I am a painter. I’m primarily interested in a perceptual approach to painting; how I ‘see’ the world, and use this as my starting point. I am also interested in how I culturally experience the world, and use as my subject the everyday and ordinary world that surrounds me. Many of the formal decisions that inform the development of the paintings are inspired by how we visually experience the world through media such as TV, film, advertising and popular culture and the language of signs and symbols that are part of our landscape. Despite this often very impersonal world we inhabit I am trying to cut through this and strip back to create more personal paintings that express something of our shared humanity.
They are primarily created from a traditional sense of wonder at the world, and are also underpinned by an interest in existential ideas associated with the essential ‘being’ of things. I prefer more traditional, physical approaches such as painting and sculpture, and enjoy the dialogue both with the materials and image. I relate more to the cave painter than the video artist. I try to adopt a more intimate approach in balance with the subject matter, particularly in my exhaustive use of drawing,. There is a deliberate lack of hierarchy in the paintings themselves, where no mark or subject takes priority. This is in an attempt to create a sense of evenness, restraint and control, and I’ve tried to explore in the paintings ideas related to style and composition that reflect this.
The paintings that are eventually made, despite being figurative, are not an attempt to present an illusion of reality or a social message but to bring into being paintings that distil my experiences and have their own concrete reality in the world. My recent practise has seen me work in the community much more in an attempt to develop my interest in the portrait. This has been supported by an Action Research grant from Longhouse, which developed into a large portrait commission and exhibition, ‘Seek My Face’, funded by the Sandwell Partnership and Multistory.
My aim has been to seek a much wider range of subjects, combined with a desire to experiment with the medium, and involve the wider community much more in the creation and experience of creating the work. I feel that this has really shifted the dynamic and direction of the work, which I am now trying to explore further But anyway, like most artists I find it fairly useless talking about these things. As the great painter Max Beckmann himself said in his creative credo, ‘You are a painter, just do your job, let those who can, talk’.
