Fields/Grids
Most of the Fields/Grids are dated between 2014 and 2017 though in truth I have worked on them on and off for more than a decade. I first developed the method of layering linocuts when I did an M.A. in Printmaking at the University of Bradford between 1999 and 2001, using Lino in a very painterly fashion, allowing layers to cover large areas of under-layers and generally over-inking the plates so that quite a thick surface of ink built up over time. When you use oil-based inks in this way you can achieve what looks like a solid layer of colour that, on closer inspection, is composed of thousands of tiny specks of ink knitted together, allowing for minute glimpses of earlier colours. Although you might compare such a surface to the pixilation of a digital image it is actually far more organic than anything electronically generated and I used those surfaces to explore ideas of elemental force - the earliest sequences were titled Elementals, Atmospheres and Surface Light.
Over time this method of printing and building images became my default way of working and most of what still exists from this period - roughly 2005 to 2015 - is done in this way. The Fields came first, images in which lines either traversed or filled a single field proscribed by the edges of the plate. All the plates were cut to the same size and printed over each other in various ways so that simple arrangements of lines very quickly became complex. I cut those lines directly into the plates so that one set printed over another would partially obliterate the earlier set except for their cross-over points and it was the intricate patterns and repeats of these cross-overs which fascinated me. As the Fields developed I started to contain all the lines within the field, that is whenever a line reached the edge of the plate/image it would be bounced back into the field rather than just disappearing off the edge - this was reminiscent of some of Brice Marden’s paintings and, as in his work, it invests the print/painting with a kind of pent-up energy.
This eventually led, after many years, to the Field/Grids in which an all-over field had a grid inscribed over the top of it and then each individual unit of the grid became a field in itself, operating in the same way as the overall field. Each section of the grid, in other words, was filled with lines which did not transgress the borders of that unit and was immediately adjacent to another such unit, building up into the whole field. If this is difficult to describe it is immediately evident in front of the images in which there is a constant tension between seeing the all-over field and picking out individual units of the grid. The pent-up energy of the earlier fields is multiplied in these Field/Grids, endlessly repeated, but in the best of them the extreme busyness of the image resolves itself into a form of harmony, much as Jackson Pollock’s all-over fields are resolved into the quiet calm of their final order.
I worked on these various sequences, not always continuously, for years, building up not only a considerable body of works but also a stock-pile of Lino-plates which could be re-used in almost infinite permutations. It wasn’t until 2014, however, that I began drawing into and on these images, using acrylic inks over the top of prints or on fresh paper as under-layers. This was the most intensive period of working on the Field/Grids when dozens of previous works, even ones which I had considered finished, were re-worked, re-printed, re-drawn. The associative range of the images suddenly expanded and various cycles, which had been in the pipeline for so long, suddenly began to resolve themselves.
This is the bare chronology of how these images developed in terms of process and basic formal features. Their thematic content is a more complex matter, especially as they stretch back over such a long period of time. One of their starting points, even earlier than 1999, was a set of drawings I made with my eyes closed in response to an exercise a group of us did as part of teacher-training. I was startled by the uninhibited vividness of these drawings and resolved to find ways of retaining that energy in more ambitious works, the initial impetus for the prints. Also at this time, around the millennium, I was working closely with a composer, Bryn Harrison, whose music, and his articulation of that music as material to be developed, repeated, altered, profoundly altered how I wanted to make paintings. So several strands of thought coincided: the materiality of an image, the way in which such materiality could both contain a physical energy and evoke more poetic or metaphysical forms of energy, and a desire to combine a more spontaneous form of image-making with an imposed and ordered structure.
It’s relatively easy, therefore, to consider these images in terms of a chaos/order dichotomy, a working through of how matter might collapse into disorder or, alternatively, how it might coalesce into form. Such a reading leads to all kinds of possible associations and one of the ones I find unavoidable, growing up when I did, is the marvel and the horror of atomic structure, at once the miraculous building blocks of matter and the secret mechanism which has unleashed one of the greatest horrors of our time. Some of the Field/Grids I think evoke some of that dark monstrosity whilst others are sheer celebrations of a life-force, however it is composed. Neither are these fixed readings for any of them. I have never tried to contrive any such reading and one of the joys of making these print-paintings is that the process can always, and generally does, throw up completely unexpected results. Another form of balance here is between knowing how to achieve certain things with an image and leaving it open enough for the unpredictable to enter the final result. For me, images need that element, a form of both surprise and ambiguity.
In the last of the Field/Grids I allowed ink to run and bleed beyond the edge of the image dictated by the size of the plates. I printed over grids which had been formed by allowing ink to run in different directions. I dropped ink onto the images from height and let it pool and shift. The images transgressed their borders and ran over the literal edges of the paper. These are the strategies that began to inform my painting and finally, after so many years, I began to shift my priorities away from printmaking towards paint on canvas. I was tired of the process and of the hard physical work of hand-burnishing so many images of this size. I decided I would make no more Lino-based works and gathered all the plates together before throwing them out. I spread them out on the floor. Then I had an idea.