Graduate, BA Fine Art, Goldsmiths
My paintings are bright, luminous, exuberant masses of energy, yet are hard to pin down. They are abstract paintings with a hint of organic forms such as trees and flowers, as well as references to Rorschach ink blots.
It is no coincidence that the large paintings are about the size of a body, with arms stretched out. The size moves them away from mass-media images. The viewer searches for traces of the artist’s body, and finds it (in the scale and the visceral nature of paint), yet because of the use of thin paint, with only a few visibly deliberate brushstrokes, the surface looks quite flat, a bit like photography, paraxodically denying the body at the same time.
With the saturation of digital images, all painting now has a relationship with photography, in that painting is today just one more image in a daily onslaught of images. We expect painting to be reproduced, and much of what we know about painting comes from reproductions. This is so much the case that an actual experience of a painting can be something of a shock, disrupting the way we normally view images. Although my work is abstract, it nevertheless bears a relationship to photography in the way that scale is played with (they can look like a view through a microscope or an aerial view), and elements such as opaque glossy patches bring the eye’s attention from the illusional space of the painting to the surface.
I embrace the materiality of paint – its fluidity, mess and uncontrollability. My work is about the fundamental contradiction or tension, between its visceral nature, and the control, form and concept that is essential for a painting to work. It is based on accidents that are created by the physical reactions of paint, and the effects of splashing, blowing and dripping. Once the overall composition is achieved in this way, layers of glazing and finely painted details are added. Thus a contradiction is created between the freedom of the initial paint application, and the control with which it is treated thereafter.
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