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| Light Within Mike Collier, March 1997 "Two lights brighten our world. One is provided by the sun, but another answers to it - the light of the eye. Only through their entwining do we see; lacking either we are blind". ( Catching the Light by A.Zajonc.) From the mid 19th Century artists have come to Cornwall, their senses awakened by the crisp, clear and penetrating light of this Celtic peninsular. When Terry Duffy first visited St Ives it was the quality of light at dawn and dusk which moved him. He says, that "at these times the light is indirect, it is fragmented, it absorbs the colour qualities in the sea, the sky and the land and mixes rich, intense and luminescent hues that are seldom produced by the direct light during the day". Inspired by the ineluctable nature of twilight Duffy experiments with forms and elusive masses that barely exist. Yet, these are not images of nihilism. Duffy explains that, "when I am painting, I am not only experimenting with the potential of certain colours, lines, forms and space but also with the life within them to express a deeper experience and inner reality". Duffy has, within his paintings, pared everything right back and we are drawn inexorably into their depths, the timelessness of their content and, as in the work of Mark Rothko, it is the audacity of the artist to create so much with so little that it takes your breath away. He has also invented a personal abstract language of animated marks, traces of life that somehow contrive to be almost figurative. The paintings appear, paradoxically, to be possessed of a strange stillness and yet also by perpetual motion. His intuitive gestures are joyous and free, marks seem to dance and leap across the surface of the painting. This delicate balance has been developed over many years of constant work and searching and it is this commitment and willingness to push his work beyond accepted boundaries that gives these recent works their complex sense of wholeness and daring. As Plato wrote, "The mind's eye begins to see clearly when the outer eye grows dim". Ultimately, Duffy's work is concerned with inner light, inner experience. He says, "many things can be described in detail but the deeper, richer and more intangible they are the more difficult they are to describe. We struggle to make sense of what we feel inside. My paintings attempt to make sense of what I feel and see inside".
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