Artists Statement

Why do I paint?  I paint to search, question and understand.  Painting gives a kind of order to my confusion; it documents my presence and my relationship to what I perceive as reality.  Choosing continually to work with the figure, I am confronted with the state of human existence.  In response when not working on portraits of specific people I chose to portray a generic body.  I look to paint not only the exterior of lives but also the inner experience to try to communicate visually, the intangible.

My studio practise consists of periods of receiving impressions, collecting, and wondering followed by intensive bursts of creativity.  I mostly draw with charcoal; my drawn lines are both hidden by and revealed by the paint.  Currently, I am painting with acrylic for quick, rapid working and layering of glazes.  I start my compositions by collaging found imagery; creating a kind of visual dictionary, which triggers ideas.

“I deal with second hand images and first hand experiences.”

(Dumas in Marlene Dumas 1974:85)

Using the preparatory source, I bend meaning by collaging together things that can’t exist in real life in scale and subject.  My paintings deviate a lot from my original source material.  I choose to draw from the collages in which I recognise something; that which hits a note inside and sings out to me.

In my portrait paintings of specific individuals, I aspire to catch something of their physical likeness, but also to cast light on the subject’s psychology.

“I look for the flash of the eye, the tiny shift of expression which portrays an inner movement.”

(Oskar Kokoschka in The penguin book of art writing 1974:85)

Painting from life I am inundated with all the changing parts of my subject, as well as ever changing light and shadow.  I find my practise is inhibited by the fear of offending the sitter; there are many injuries to the ego throughout the process.  I chose to paint free from the presence of the sitter, using my photography as the bones of the portrait. Working alone I bring back the person through my painting like a relocation.  I try to capture something from only one of the sitter’s many selves; opening up the model to be witnessed.

Artists work that I feel an aesthetic connection to and see similar traits to my own paintings in are: Frances Bacon, Marlene Dumas and Egon Schiele.  Bacon’s reinvention of portraiture in the age of photography, his process of creativity through found imagery, has authenticated and given me permission to work with photographic images.  His paintings open up areas of feeling and I am particularly interested in how he attempts’ to paint a psychological zone.  What I admire about Marlene Dumas is how brave and honest an artist she is, seemingly there is little hierarchy if any between her creations. Most poignantly her works invite conversation; it is suggestive to all sorts of narrative and plays heavily on the viewer’s analysis of meaning.  It is very generous in its space for interpretation.  Something that Dumas achieves and which I aspire to is to be a painter who is in the tradition of painting but who manages to use their painting to reflect conceptual ideas.  I have also admired Egon Schieles raw drawing ability, his abandonment of rules and his prolific production.  There is something that all three of these artists have in common; all three produce figurative paintings, where the subjects are portrayed with no or little background information.  I like to edit the visual surroundings in my paintings with blocks of opaque colour, which provides a clear space, a stark back ground in which the figure can articulate itself.  All of their work have been perceived by viewers as having dual traits of both attraction and repulsion.

In the future, I would like to make my work even more immediate in its impact.  I will attempt this by being more open to instinctive mark-making; giving room to the marks made outside of reason enables one to work beyond normal levels of consciousness and brings certain clarity.  I am particularly attracted to the aesthetic of tight representational mark-making alongside organic instinctual marks.  I wish to achieve something more basic and fundamental in my drawing, rather than just recording something on a superficial, literal level.

“Isn’t it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation, other than simple illustration.”

(David Sylmester in Interviews with Frances Bacon    : 56)

I also want to explore how I can better reflect my critical concerns through the medium of paint. I am planning to address creating time and movement in my paintings and experiment with different dimensions of canvas.

The meaning behind my paintings is an open question.  I am searching, aware of the shortness of existence and I am trying to discover some elemental truths about myself and life.  I hint at narrative but it is a confused voice.  The paintings both shout out and are silent; they conceal and reveal like a kind of foiled communication.  The viewers bring differing conclusions and estuations to the meaning of my work which says more about them as individuals than the paintings.  I do sometimes put in hints of a narrative but I always leave space for the viewers search for meaning; visually, theoretically, and emotionally.  I am not saying anything exact or specific; I intend the paintings to be a begining not an end.

A violent stimulus produces a trauma in an organism.  So too a work of art, if it really is a work of art, can create a genuine experience, a visual shock, in consciousness of a receptive observer.

(Oskar Kokoschka 1974)

Recognising the significance of the beauty and suffering that surrounds us.  I myself in the creation of my works and in the reflection of the finished pieces am trying to weigh things up, and give voice to my own confusion.  We live in a screened existence where we forget to see.  My attempt is to lift a veil for a time and look again.  My paintings are the living material of my thoughts; essentially me, but driven by a living anxiety where the canvas becomes a stage, for the paint to play out the stark truths. 

The struggle to realise my paintings is a collection of efforts.  One of which is being able to recognise when to stop; when the painting is at its most living point