5 June 2021

About.

People often ask what my painting is about. It’s quite an impossible question to answer, because it’s about everything and nothing. 

I paint primarily because I love the material.   The colour and marks and how they interact and make something new. Painting feels like longing.  I’m searching for something in paint, something about my place in the world and simply about being. 

All sorts of thoughts and feelings and memories bubble up as I paint - things I’ve seen, felt, heard, done - some I squash immediately, others I embrace and the painting becomes about that for a while, but the thought fades and the work continues. 

And after. Looking at a painting, an object, that I made last week or 10 years ago. What that object is about changes over time, it begins to represent a time and place.  It becomes a physical memory of its own making. 

Now it’s here.  This room brings a new layer of context to the work.  In this place do the paintings become about the people who lived and worked in this room?

And you.  You’re not a blank wall.  What you see, feel, think makes the painting about something else entirely.

January 2021

I paint.

I might begin with a vague notion, reflecting on an earlier painting, or something I noticed on the way to the studio, or remembered from a while ago.  But soon I’ll digress, and thought will be superseded by action, on and off the canvas.   On some level I must be thinking about form, composition, mark, space, light and colour – the things of painting – but it’s mostly about letting my body and eyes do the work, responding to what’s happening right now. 

I paint with oil paint from tubes on stretched canvas. I want an edge to work up to, to contain the surface.  I like to build the support from scratch.  Then it feels like I have made an object from the very beginning.  Sometimes I use readymade primed canvas, but that feels like I’ve joined in the middle of the process.

I fight the doubt, trying to find my way. I overthin the paint with too much turps. I use the drip when I’m stuck. I turn the canvas, a bigger brush, mess up the marks.  A splash of cold water to the face.  I push the paint around with my brush, scrape it off, wash it off with a brush full of turps, scrub it off with an old t shirt.  Then I put it back on again.  I repeat myself, over and over again.  Say the same thing in slightly different ways.  Then I forget what I did, turn the painting around and do it again.

The speed of the painting changes, depending on energy, depending on the weather, or the music.  There are fast areas and slow areas.  Some paintings are too fast, I try to stop them, hold them down, they embarrass me.  I try to keep myself contained.  

When do I stop?  Ideally when the painting feels closed.  When I stand in front of it with the loaded brush but there’s nowhere for the mark to sit, but sometimes I stop too late.  

I have an odd sense of time.  It’s always now.  My paintings are like this - everything that has happened is on the surface.  It’s everything, all at the same time.

I’m looking for myself through painting.  Looking for myself in paint.  It’s not an expression of self, it’s a search, a trying to make sense. Sometimes I think I’m there, but it’s fleeting.  Then it’s gone, I stretch another canvas and begin again.