ADAM PYETT

Recent Paintings

Sophie Gannon Gallery

29 Jul 2025 – 16 Aug 2025

Given a choice between looking at a lemon, and looking at a decent painting of a lemon, we would all choose to look at the painting. A passing glance at the real lemon is enough, and our eye quickly moves on. Not so with the painting, with a painting our eye will linger. Whilst we are not conscious of it happening, our eyes and brain must solve the puzzle of a two-dimensional rendering of a real-world subject. It seems that our interest in the puzzle is key to why our eyes will linger on a painting.

The act of painting is akin to that of distilling. Like flavours, some elements are enhanced, some weakened, and some removed. To make a painting of a real-world subject, it is necessary to distil and change what you see. How much to change is the question, and there is no simple answer. You need to enhance important elements and remove non-important elements. If the painting is a puzzle, then we solve it by interpreting what remains. If the painting is successful, then we enjoy looking at it.

When I make a painting, I keep the needs of the painting foremost in my thinking. If it seems that a painting needs the sky to be violet, then I make it violet. The need is driven by the relationship with other colours in the painting. Equally, if I decide that a painting will have a blue sky, this dictates the colours I use for the rest of the landscape. If we consider a painting to be a self-contained world, then the colours must make sense within the world of the painting but not outside it. In a good painting, the relationship between the colours will be harmonious.

The subject of my paintings is really the painting itself rather than a particular landscape. What happened in the last painting I made is more of an influence on the next than is the landscape I am depicting. If the last sky was violet, then the next might be blue to be different. Or it might be violet again to be the same. Or it might be yellow because I haven’t done that before. I try to make the paintings more interesting by using different techniques, different pigments and a variety of marks across the canvas. My practice is about learning to make more interesting paintings and becoming a better painter.

Adam Pyett - 2025