Callum Innes (b. 1962)

Callum Innes’ artistic practice delicately balances processes of addition and subtraction, producing serene abstract visions that reveal properties of paint that usually go unseen. Painting fields of colour, Innes carefully applies turpentine to areas of the canvas, stripping the paint away to reveal new residual tones; often repeating this process, Innes produces washes of complex, interacting colours, shaped by the nature of the brush and the flow of turpentine alone. Innes has developed several series, developing a range of motifs according to his variations in technique, and Formed with White from 1990 represents one of the artist’s earliest ‘formed paintings’, works that trace winding, organic lines of tone vertically down the canvas. With its canvas teeming with exceptionally fine stems of a pale brown or pink, Formed with White presents the viewer with a glimmering plane of tone, as what seems to be an expanse of white dissolves into infinitesimal visual detail; amid the flow of lines depths begin to emerge, giving the work with an immersive, meditative calm.