Chameleon #4 (2025)

Chameleon #4 by British artist Tim Willcox is a contemporary abstract mixed media painting that marks the quiet culmination of the Chameleon 1-4 series. Here, Tim further loosens his earlier architectural and environmental references, allowing colour, gesture and surface to take precedence over narrative. Urban symbols remain present but softened, fractured and pushed back, becoming suggestions rather than statements within an increasingly intuitive abstract language.

With Chameleon #4, I wanted to let go a little more as across the series I’ve been slowly shifting away from a clear environmental narrative and leaning into the joy and tension of abstraction itself. In this painting, familiar motifs are still there if you look for them, but they’ve been deliberately blurred, broken and quietened. The pedestrian crossing beacon hovers as an incomplete signal, half-recognisable and half-forgotten, while architectural forms retreat into the background rather than asserting themselves.

What interested me most here was how colour and shape could carry the weight instead. I worked instinctively, letting blocks of pink, green and red push against one another, building a sense of movement and balance without needing to explain themselves. Marks overlap, edges soften and meanings drift. Any sense of land versus development is now only a faint echo, not a message but a memory.

This painting feels like a release point for the series. A place where process, play and abstraction take the lead, and where the work is allowed to simply exist on its own terms, story optional.