Artistically driven by a turbulent year and the psychological problems associated with living with prostate cancer, Meaghan has embarked upon an autobiographical dialogue of studies and paintings that echo his life in a way nothing has before. In the artist’s words, “I used to think art ran parallel to life or what we painted as artists was parallel to the real world, now I feel I am truly inhabiting my paintings, they are me and my life. I am not only living it I'm foretelling it too. It feels amazing and I am consumed by the magic of it and what I can do.”
Meaghan paints what it feels like to be human. He celebrates sensuality in a way only he knows how: from the simply beautiful to the crudely libidinal, phallic and yonic, using imagery that is playfully obscene or salaciously smutty. In doing so he obliges us to immerse ourselves into his visual and tactile Edenic Paradiso.
The resulting exhibition brings together doodles, drawings, and sketches using a number of new mediums: watercolour, ink, pastels, and coloured pencils. They allow Meaghan’s ‘mind-maps’ a freedom, fluidity and immediacy not necessarily associated with his larger layered paintings. Here Meaghan’s thoughts and ideas are brought to life: his subjects, his fears, the subtle narrative, and scope. The aesthetic gorgeousness of colour and the diversity of painterly language, from graphic description to swishy mark making, all come together to form a visual feast of overlapping veils of experience and highly personal figuration created from a combination of observation, memory, and invention.
Heavy Amber
watercolour and ink on Lana Vanguard hi-tech paper
60x50cm
2019
The Conversation
watercolour and ink on Lana Vanguard hi-tech paper
60x50cm
2019
Got a Big Flush On
watercolour, ink and acrylic on Lana Vanguard Hi-Tech paper
60x50cm
2019
The Fall
watercolour, ink and acrylic on Lana Vanguard Hi-Tech paper
40x60cm
2019
The Joy of Life
watercolour and ink on Lana Vanguard hi-tech paper
60x50cm
2019
A Shared Mind
watercolour and ink on Bockingford watercolour paper
28x38cm
2019
Night Drawing
watercolour, ink and pastel on paper
42x30cm
2019
Wild Rose
watercolour, ink and pastel on paper
42x30cm
2019
Meaghan Paradiso
watercolour and ink on Bockingford watercolour paper
28x38cm
2019
Faery Glen
watercolour and ink on Bockingford watercolour paper
30x23cm
2019
Cigar Smokin' Lovers
watercolour and ink on Arches watercolour paper
30x23cm
2019
The Approaching Wall
watercolour and ink on Arches watercolour paper
36x28cm
2019
Luminaries
watercolour, ink & Pastel on Blockingford watercolour paper
42x 30cm
2019
Temptation of a Saint
watercolour, ink & Pastel on Blockingford watercolour paper
42x 30cm
2019