John Loker Upturned Bucket 2, 2024

British artist John Loker (b. 1939) has produced rigorously conceived, meticulously produced and visually mesmerising works of art across many different media for six decades. John Loker is a classic twentieth-century abstract artist in his dialectical approach to image making. His images derive from the simplifications of landscape, other natural phenomena, and familiar objects, from ditches and copses to cauldrons to spinning tops, and news-oriented material like space shuttles and border crossings, produced according to a process (or set of rules).

This particular bucket seems to have sidled into my thoughts, therefore onto paper, and is inevitably heading to canvas. The image has many interpretations or meanings. It sits well as an image in a painting, slightly comical, leaky, or upturned. I am exploring the possibilities through a series of small works, of which this is one.