Iceberg by Caspar Fairhall

Medium: Oil and acrylic on Belgian linen
Size: 1370×1370
Gallery: Kamile Gallery

Working across both traditional and new media, I try to bring a painter’s sensibility to everything: a concern with image surface and illusion, form and volume, colour relationships and composition, texture and so on. That’s a set of both a conceptual and aesthetic concerns.

My work aims to combine figurative and abstract approaches. Even in a figurative painting such as Iceberg, the visual vocabulary is drawn from the legacy of geometric abstraction. Pictures are paradoxes, so I see figuration and abstraction as tributaries of the same river.

Iceberg is motionless, which to my mind implies a sense of indefinite — or perhaps, undefined — time. The image is of something that looks permanent and monumental despite its fragile and fleeting nature. My hope is that we will always have icebergs and glaciers in the world; my fear is that this painting may be a kind of cenotaph.