My paintings are a kind of dance between different tempos. Slow layering of colour and fast mark making. I am looking for a solution, that is always shifting but at the same time I am one step behind. Ready to draw a conclusion too quickly. The point becomes a challenge to let that solution go, and the process involves finding a place within myself when I can let that happen, to let the painting beat myself at my own game and become something I didn’t see coming. Colour is a very important part of what I do, and I try to use it to extend this notion that there is something to be solved. I think of lines as being part of another layer of colour that has expanded and broken up, taking themselves through one layer to the next to make an image that condenses everything into a moment of recognition before a sense of grammar kicks in.
How to make a painting.
In order to be able to make a painting, I have to be prepared to forget who I think I am and everything I think I know; every time. Forgeting is part of the process.
Painting is an exercise in consciousness. Not so much who am I - but where am I? Where is consciousness located? It’s also something to do with the nature of time; how time behaves. It seems to loop round like a stretched out spring.
When I started out, I was obsessed with how to make a painting work formally. How to integrate space; but that’s only a skeleton on which to hang the flesh. Painting is more than that. It’s an exploration of the psyche, and of our relationship with the planet. It’s about becoming rather than just being, about finding a pathway, and the pathway having a sense of place. I want to create a kind of Nomadology of time and space. An anti-history. if you like. We are, after all, naturally nomadic, mentally, if not physically.
If memory and consciousness are closely linked, if memory is a kind of ‘guiding hand , what does this mean? That time moves in two directions? Something which remembers where we’ve been before? Are the paintings like little moments of déjà vu? They do seem to be moments of recognition - of…what?
I paint, until I can bear to look. Or even until I cant tear my eyes away. The image has to surprise in some way. I have to think: how did that get there? I paint to lose myself. To lose and forget, so as to find a sense of clarity.
I see the process of as painting as time travel. If you could move around the universe at the speed of light, you would undoubtedly meet yourself coming the other way. And this other self would be a vision of pure clarity. Baggage free, and the moment you start to feel jealous of this baggage free other you, is the moment you fall back to earth; and you are standing there, with a paintbrush in your hand.
Painting is an exercise in consciousness. Not so much who am I - but where am I? Where is consciousness located? It’s also something to do with the nature of time; how time behaves. It seems to loop round like a stretched out spring.
When I started out, I was obsessed with how to make a painting work formally. How to integrate space; but that’s only a skeleton on which to hang the flesh. Painting is more than that. It’s an exploration of the psyche, and of our relationship with the planet. It’s about becoming rather than just being, about finding a pathway, and the pathway having a sense of place. I want to create a kind of Nomadology of time and space. An anti-history. if you like. We are, after all, naturally nomadic, mentally, if not physically.
If memory and consciousness are closely linked, if memory is a kind of ‘guiding hand , what does this mean? That time moves in two directions? Something which remembers where we’ve been before? Are the paintings like little moments of déjà vu? They do seem to be moments of recognition - of…what?
I paint, until I can bear to look. Or even until I cant tear my eyes away. The image has to surprise in some way. I have to think: how did that get there? I paint to lose myself. To lose and forget, so as to find a sense of clarity.
I see the process of as painting as time travel. If you could move around the universe at the speed of light, you would undoubtedly meet yourself coming the other way. And this other self would be a vision of pure clarity. Baggage free, and the moment you start to feel jealous of this baggage free other you, is the moment you fall back to earth; and you are standing there, with a paintbrush in your hand.
