Paintings 2018 - 2022
Since 2018 I have been making numbered sequences of paintings on unprimed canvas using acrylic paints and it is these numbered sequences which are to be found under the Painting heading on the website. They are markedly different from any paintings made on canvas before that date and are the first paintings on canvas which I regard as wholly successful - and by that I mean that I achieved something of what I hoped to achieve and could live with the results. Most of the canvases I painted before this point, going back as far as the late nineteen eighties, have been destroyed.
If over all these years I have struggled to produce work on canvas, I have not had that problem with paper, especially when it comes to printmaking, and it was trying to transfer some of the techniques from printmaking onto canvas which flummoxed me for so long. The big change around 2018 came from making screen prints, rather than relief or intaglio prints, and discovering a way of layering images which readily lent itself to working with acrylic. Another change arose from the collaborative work I had been making with the graphic artist Steve Rodgers where, for the most part, I had limited myself to using only black ink in the development of imagery. These two strands enabled me, almost overnight, to suddenly regard the canvas as a large drawing and to lay down blacks with the kind of freedom that had hitherto been reserved for works on paper. When the first washes of black acrylic went down on the sized cotton I felt an immediate release and excitement which is still carrying me through today.
The imagery of the paintings has been gestating for a much longer period of time, perhaps since my first landscape drawings and paintings made when I was in my early twenties, over thirty years ago. I was always drawn to the individual tree rather than the expansive view and, during a three year period in Cornwall, to clusters of rocks rather than coastal scenes. Much to the bafflement of tourists visiting my studio, I did a series of drawings/pastels/charcoal works of a single rock on the beach - admittedly quite a stately rock which stood, like a menhir, on its own patch of sand - constantly re-shuffling its contours and markings, pushing towards an edge of abstraction. It’s not just that these drawings initiated working in series, but more that they mark the beginning of a fascination with breaking down and then re-formulating form. When I pushed this process further, with another set of rocks embedded in a cliff-side, the subject finally became unrecognisable and I titled the pieces Evolutions.
I have been doing a similar thing, one way or another, ever since. This imagery found a new focus when I did an M.A. in Printmaking at the University of Bradford, from 1999 to 2001, which was also when I began to collaborate with the composer Bryn Harrison. It was Bryn, more than any tutor or fellow visual artist, who taught me how to regard visual imagery as material, just as he regarded sound as material, to be altered, repeated, inverted, overlaid. The prints I made to go with his music, the Elementals from 2000 and the Atmospheres and Surface Light from the following year, initiated a new phase in my work, now completely released from any observational drawing. This abstract vein of working, allowing cycles of imagery to develop and shift and, finally, to decay, has been my modus operandi ever since.
Leaving aside many intervening sequences of work on paper, I began the 2018 canvases in response to the death of my step-father. The notion of six circles, vertically arranged in two rows, came to me as a kind of memorial and the first four or five paintings were done without any hesitation, with all the excitement of new discovery. I wanted them to be severe, to carry some of that weight of loss, but at the same time my work has always centred on a feeling for contained energy, for something vital and alive which constantly threatens the boundaries of units within the pictorial field or, in the case of these paintings, the boundaries of the canvas itself. I think this contradiction, if it is a contradiction, runs through the whole series: they are both memorial paintings, dealing with the loss of people dear to me and celebrations of the miraculous energy which makes up living being. On some days they all look very funereal to me and on others they seem to be dancing with joy.
If asked what they mean, or pressed to articulate a central thematic concern, then I would say that coming-into-being is what I think about most, after the event, once the paintings have been made. My main endeavour whilst I am working on them is to somehow bring forms into being without contriving how those forms should look. I never outline a form or deliberately create a particular shape, I work almost through a form of misdirection, creating sets of loops or circles which overlap and, in that process of overlapping, create something unexpected. Most of the time I am more interested in what arises within those circles and loops, but they are a necessary evil - I can think of no other way to generate the kind of organic forms I want to see - and they have a force of their own, pushing against the literal boundary of the painting and sometimes dissolving that boundary, so that the painting seems to float, like some kind of plasma hovering in front of the wall.
Coming-into-being, I would suggest, is an idea which can operate in terms of the painting itself or in metaphorical terms, though separating those two out is probably impossible. The way in which forms coalesce in these paintings, the way in which separate pieces of matter seem to join and fuse, is for me evocative of natural processes, whether that be the slow accretion of matter over millennia or the explosive disruption of form when the natural world erupts or floods or burns. Some of the paintings seem to suggest the vast spaces of the universe, the impersonal distances of cosmic phenomena, whilst others seem more akin to a microscopic world. There is also in my mind an association with bodies, our own human bodies and our embodied experience of the world: these paintings hold together or fall apart and our understanding of those processes, it seems to me, stems from our own experience of inhabiting a body. Which points to another ambiguity within the work, whether what is being shown is a coming-into-being or a going-out-of-being. I think this depends as much on the viewer as on any intention I might have brought to an individual painting and in front of these canvases I hope there is enough space for either response, or even the thought that a lack of certainty might be essential in such matters.