Finished just in time for India
I've spent a long time on these paintings, although they may not appear cohesive as a body of work, they share a method I have been to exploring. Therefore, it makes more sense to discuss the process in the layers and, if I am honest, I am far more fluent in describing how I arrived here than what each painting became, as that was just the end point for me.
I am a fan of Guillermo Lorca and heard him say in an interview , ‘If I wanted to, I could repeat a painting’. https://www.instagram.com /guillermolorcagarcia/?hl=en I could not do that with this work, the layers underneath are not a gradual build up to a roughly preplanned composition, they bear little resemblance to the final surface.
My process is driven by tools, paint, thoughts, and experiences with fluctuating hierarchy. A multi-layering of decisions, planes and U-turns until gradually the painting unfolds.
Each work follows a similar method:
A broad starting point related to a thought or experience, a new brush or colour with no idea concerning an end point.
Focus on how paint behaves, as it slides, drags, dabs and mixes. The load of the brush, the tension that comes with the unpredictable outcome that maximises the sense of responding to paint and tools.
Responding to marks that trigger thoughts and experiences, with themes, sensations coming and going with the layers evolving into a multidimensional world on canvas. .
In each painting there seem to be small spaces that survive through the layers like a thread that pins everything down to the canvas.
The result becomes a trail of pigment, both visible and concealed. A build-up of time and paint as I form and reform forging a pathway that shifts between abstraction and representation. Connections are formed that speak to my experience of being in this world, not a world of objects with connections but a sense of a vast and intimate interconnected whole.
I am struggling to articulate have my description sounds a bit clunky but it is the most honest way I can describe this body of work.
Apoco Landscape
162cm x100cm oil on canvas
Apoca landscape,’ began two years ago as just marks on the canvas to move on from blank canvas syndrome. Initially the marks resembled dry, waste, bones, machines. The name was just something to call it when saving a folder for process images. Whilst no longer visually apocalyptic the name stays as it refers to a journey of creation and destruction as I investigated the personality of mediums and tools, moved through thoughts and places I have been to and imagined. The journey holds memories of the scumble, thick draggability of Zecchi’s lead white hue versus Norma’s smooth buttery titanium white, through Polignano di Mare, Istanbul, Welsh coast, Thai river stone near a drunken party, the discovery of Cobalt blue and its glow in the shadows, the change in a brush over time as the bristles shorten with use. This painting now stops in a place with crevice’s I know well.
Looking up.
162cm x100cm oil on canvas
In the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville, there was no one around it was 32° outside and I lay on the cold flag stone floor in a vestry/priest prep room, looking up at 17th century Baroque artist,Juan de Valdés Leal’s, ‘Triumph of the Cross.’ This drew me into the sensation of looking up as my starting point which sent me into conversation with 17th century, Venetian artist, Giambattista Tiepolo with his illusionistic planes and perspectives evoking a sense of the mythical, the mysterious. All woven together in discussions with cobalt, olive, Barcelona, trans earth, cats tongue, Roath Park.
City and Nature
120cm x120cm oil on canvas
These two paintings began as an experience when I entered a shipping container installation by Mark James in front of Cardiff train station. https://www.instagram.com/p/DB3leCcoijO/ On entering you looked up into neon street signs reaching out into the distance. We then headed to New Zealand to live for 3 months in our shipping container in the bush. Whilst there l joined friends in a shared studio space in Hamilton to paint and share good times.
What started as two squares, merely for the convenience of having to dismantle for return to the UK with max free parcel length of 120cm, developed into a strategy as I turned them around, butted them together, pulled them apart constantly shifting their sensation as the invading forces of humanity, unfamiliar paints, brushes and nature merged/emerged. Connections formed and broken, redirected and reshaped until it felt right to stop.
It’s very hard to let go of these paintings but I reached a point where I thought STOP, just stop or you could be here for another 2 years, such a hard decision like saying goodbye to friend and nemesis. I have headed to Sri Lanka and India for 5 months. I am taking paints, tools, sketch book and a stone that belonged to Nicola Quinn an artist friend who died too soon and I wish I had known her better.