Paintings from 2000 - 2003*

* Paintings from 2000 - 2003

Another period of transition, of "shaking things up," characterized as usual by varying the proportions and size, experimenting with intense colours, varying techniques for rendering the fields, and an apparent oscillation between elegance and turbulence.

Too much can be made of the events in a painter's personal life when considering his work, but the one clear relation is quantitative. Bloore's bypass surgery in '85 slowed him down considerably but ultimately liberated him from teaching. The death, on December 31st, 1999, of his wife Dorothy Cameron was another matter. By the following summer output had slowed to a trickle like a spring after the fall.

Work had begun to flow again in May 2002 when news came from the landlord that we had to move out. This severely de-stabilized production until the summer of '03. It might be said, perhaps a bit over-dramatically, that Bloore had his painting legs taken out from under him that June to December (the move took place at the end of August) and he regained his stride from June to December '03.

In an interview with Linda Corbett for her film White Balance, shot mostly in 2003, Bloore expressed concern that these paintings might be "too apparently emotionally derived."

Now that the Dark Chocolate paintings of 2004 have been realized, the searching process so evident in this period of transition can be seen as a natural development.