Stirry Stirry Sky

The story of Stirry Stirry Sky begins with the collection and storage of small pieces of hardened acrylic paint cut from old paintings. Rohan Wealleans works like a sculptor in paint, building up layers of colour which he then carves, bends and manipulates, leaving painting off-cuts on his studio floor like rainbow-coloured wood chips.

Stirry Stirry Sky comes from his attempt to work resourcefully with these leftovers by building up a mosaic-like image from tiles of paint. The largest of these tiles comes from a ball of pure paint which Wealleans built up over a year and includes here as a dissected slab of raw material. Riffing off the swirling sky in Vincent van Gogh’s famous 1889 painting The Starry Night, Wealleans creates an image of a figure drifting through an underworld.

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