A concerto notes the insect

For his 2017 exhibition ‘New Paintings’ at the Saatchi Gallery, artist and fashion designer Arthur Yates employed a radical strategy. ‘In the past’, he said of his earlier paintings, ‘it was where I’d just create something that I liked, and they were just a bit pretty and didn’t have much to them, so I wanted to free myself from myself.’ To make this leap to freedom, Yates turned to the Internet. He called for submissions of pencil drawings, his only condition being that the subjects must be drawn from sight of memory. As he recalls, ‘the idea was to get sketches and works from public – so now I have this army online of people who create things for me. I get given what I get given, and I create a new canvas. All the randomness and the chaotic nature of this is what I like, and has freed me from expectations’. Layering the images he has been sent in rich, palimpsestic compositions like A Concerto Notes the Insect, Yates conjures a surprising beauty from this hive-mind of imagery. The work presents a mosaic of things seen by people around the world: a hand, a lightbulb, a tennis racket, bagpipes, a stuffed koala, a puppet, mugs of coffee, a pair of headphones. If many of the objects are recognisable or even comforting in their domesticity, they also speak of the journey of the creative process, of artists casting their eyes over their surroundings for inspiration. Hovering in delicate charcoal and pastel outlines against a flat, tan background, the drawings are as ghostly and intangible as ideas; they stop at a blank border, an endless space waiting to be filled with a layered diversity of human experience.
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