Some observations on painting

Painting. For me this act, this process, this extreme discipline has provided a central purpose to my life. On the one hand it seems a natural, almost effortless way of articulating experience, on the other, it poses a continuing series of deeply challenging visual questions that require and seemingly demand resolution. This balance between the instinctive, the intuitive and the deeply critical reflective absorption in both the methodologies and outcomes of my work is at the core of my practice as a visual artist. I am aware and constantly reminded of the tension in this balance, as one strives to reconcile the pragmatic and essential need to paint, to play and formulate possibilities, and to develop a meaningful understanding of the primarily non linguistic form that is painting, with the intellectual dictates of locating the work within a relevant conceptual framework. 

 Painting, is an active response to a blank surface, often unplanned, reliant on empathic response and heightened levels of expressivity and creativity, informed by ingrained and ‘hard won’ practice to create a vital reflective statement. This statement being the defining manifestation of a personal series of ‘embodied understandings’, summative outpourings of the highly personalized complexity of ‘self’ which arrive at the singularity of the event of making a painting. These events reflect the creative state at any one time, the current preoccupation, the new discovery, the child like delight in the retrieval of the power of mark, gesture and colour on surface or the moment of attuned clarity. So work will grow, change and adapt to circumstance, it is both a ‘where you’re at now’ and a ‘where you’ve always been’. Each painting occuping a unique space in the continuum of a life’s work, relating directly to contemporaneous images and holding within it traces of the paths that led to this point. A painting is the concrete externalisation of a unique view of the world, and one that reminds us of the potential for creative vision to illuminate truths, and uncover aspects of the ‘essence’ that underpins all things.

 As a painter one aspect of my practice involves an articulation of the expression of landscape, not through the analytical and ultimately illusional process of actual depiction, but rather to give the sense of a perceptual experience itself through the same sensual processes with which we understand and process the complexity of the subject matter. This involves the construction of a lattice of meaning, a layered and inter-referential web which attempts to conjure up and record that moment where the landscape is perceived in its entirety, where perception and reflection join to produce Art.

The landscape itself is a hugely rich receptacle of meaning and textual potential, it is the physical space we inhabit and our relationship to it is fundamental. In many ways we are evolutionarily tailored to respond to this space, indeed at the deepest levels of our psyche, our very survival depends on an awareness and ability to interact with, and understand its subtleties.  My painterly responses have lead to the development within the work of a network of interrelated visual components, derived from direct contact with the external environment, where the act of looking becomes elevated to a process of absorption and the nuance and the fleeting become forces within the work. So marks can appear, often subtlety at first, gain significance and meaning and can be developed over a series of works then vanish only to resurface sometimes years later, as part of the lexicon of a personal visual vocabulary. Some of the resultant paintings refer to a diversity of textual elements drawn from such disparate fields as archeology, history, climatology, geology, personal and folk memory and myth as well as more formal considerations such as colour, composition, tone, texture, light and surface. These texts are then merged, juxtaposed and over-layed, edited and reworked, with resolutions dependant on the recognition and development of any implied narratives that may surface, striving towards the generation of a sense of ‘ wholeness’ within the perceptual field that is the final painting. By wholeness I mean a balance between the meaning implied in the work, its apperence, structurally and compositionally, the energy of its marks, gestures and colour resonances, its surface both texturally and through the diversity of the brush and line marks apparent .

Work takes place in the studio, either in Mid Devon or a workspace I use in coastal West Brittany, the two spaces being at the heart of their respective elemental locations, reflecting the duality of the maritime and the moorland.

The work rarely, if ever refers to actual viewpoints or vistas, places are not represented but evoked, division of the pictorial plane to create a horizon often occurs and sky forms and land forms are often developed in their corresponding areas.

I am interested in the edges of things within a painting and this zone of ‘betweeness’ is often at the heart of where the paintings fundamental structure occurs, this zone has to feel right, often complex and interlocking, I feel this is necessary to give a sense of unity and cohesion to the overall painting. I have extended this study of edges into some of the works on card I have been producing over the last two years where the painted form exists within a boundary created by the layers of paint and resides on a blank ground, the forms often display geometric divisions and explore ideas of  ‘poetic placement’ and principles of organic order, the resultant works start to resemble seeds or cells or in some cases the painted shields of some imaginary lost tribe. This particular way of working enables a more expansive and open-ended approach to making a painting where there are less formal restrictions and where the layering and marks made are visible and seem somehow truthful to the process.

In other paintings the detailed, underlaid, painted ground becomes fragmented and pockets of detail become isolated in the spatial field of the canvas so forms of a more rectangular nature arise that operate as devices that run  rhythmically across the surface of the painting, like scattered snapshots or stills from a film. This way of working enables the encoding of a kind of chronology into the pieces and their titles often reflect the passage of time and seasonal occurrences in the natural world. I use collaged elements to encrypt particular resonances within each painting, setting a scene, creating a mood but rarely are they overtly narrative,  preferring suggestion and the active engagement of the viewer to complete the work.

Other aspects of my work include the more process based paintings of allowing paint to move across a surface, often producing a network of stripes which again relate to time and the structure of landscape and grid paintings which allow marks to be selected, isolated and locked within a formal structure somehow heightening their presence and creating images with great internal balance and authority.