ABOUT

Art and warfare will elope together given half the chance. The resulting communion is often spectacular, as is usually the case with surprising bedfellows. The British Special Air Service are said to be terribly proud of their bright pink Land Rovers.

Young, Battersea-based painter Elliot Winspear has not yet been sent to wage war, like surrealist camoufleurs Paul Klee and André Mare. But he is on a mission. “Before I began painting I was in the confinement of comfort zones,” he says “video games, football, weed, working in retail and all that stuff.” He didn’t think painting “stuff that appealed to me visually, with camouflage patterns included intuitively just to add depth,” would present the challenge to wrest him from his stupor.

But “finding out the science, and the mentality, has been interesting and quite overwhelming,” he says of being confronted by colour theory - which initially had to be figured out by Isaac Newton in his book Opticks, so one can assume is quite complex.

Undeterred, Elliot took on the highly technical and ambitious process of creating abstract colour canvases, first with gouache “which was far too expensive,” then with acrylics. He involved himself in the challenge so deeply that he initially refused to use masking tape to stop colours running into each other.

‘I’ve learned to be a little more loose with it because it can get quite stressful,” he reports, “I’m more forgiving with my colour matching and any human error. Now he is “just enjoying the process.”

Mindful walking became Elliot’s “coping mechanism” he says, recording images of textures and colours that appealed, “building up a bank of inspiration.” It’s a mindset shared by British abstract oil painter Liza Giles whose works in her own words ‘Are driven by an impetus to “switch off” and re-engage with our instinct’.

Another British contemporary abstract painter, Andrew Graves, is inspired by cycling. Elliot was first inspired by designs on the Maharishi clothing his more well-off teenage contemporaries sported at the skate park.

“Using a Maharishi leaf pattern was intended to provide a structure for colours and textures I’d seen in my local environment,” Elliot explains, “Its all very precise and I’m trying to match sketches, photos, and reduce a palette down from hundreds of shades and textures.”

Elliot painstakingly developed a system for transferring his artistic impetus on to canvas: “I’m self-conscious in a good way",” he says, “and as soon as I had a positive narrative it went forward.”

Upon first seeing camouflage patterns in 1915, Pablo Picasso exclaimed to Gertrude Stein, ‘We invented that.’ Stein a student of William James, herself commented on the artistic differences between the designs of different nations, claiming it ‘Made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.’ Even from the grisly ground stuff of industrialised warfare, fantasia springs.