Heywood & Condie’s Analog Paint Pour Series: Floral Portraits draws on the rich tradition of both landscape scenic portraiture and the ‘floral still life’ but clearly intend to evoke other media formats.

Formally these works clearly reference a 1950s abstract colourfield painting, especially when they are represented as photographic stills. As moving images however they now introduce a sense of narrative, something the abstract expressionists avoided.

Whilst providing the immediate experience of the materiality of paint, albeit in flowing form, these video works also have a specific figurative subject matter. Each pour is the abstract representation of a specific floral bloom; in this respect aspects of traditional floral portraiture captured in the ‘botanical still life' have been upturned.

The flower has now been reduced to an 'experience' of pure colour, reduced to flowing paint on a vertical surface. The changing colour palette over time attempts to capture the ephemeral nature of a living flower or field of flowers as they bloom over time and fade during their life cycle. For the artists however, the flowers always retain a vital sense of beauty at any stage in their life cycle that could not be captured in a' traditional still life'.

There is a performative aspect to Heywood and Condie’s work. The artists synchronistically pour the paint at either side of the canvas to create moments of tension as the individual paint pours meet, thus highlighting the notions of randomness and process, which are both integral to the work, and are reflective of the temporality of nature.