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I am an artist currently living and working in London. This website includes a selection of my work going back over 15 years. It will evolve to include both new and older paintings.
Background to the work
Most of the work is about the ordinary business of living. I am interested in a painting that explores relationships, people, contemporary urban spaces.
Although people tend to be the focus of attention, I am also concerned with the context of social interaction. There are recurring themes in the pictures which fascinate me, such as the interplay of signs within the cityscape, or how urban architecture creates a visually distinctive micro-environment at street level, and how momentary appearances are registered, glimpsed or over-looked in passing by.
My work developed over a period of time when I was exploring the use of a less literally descriptive, painterly, figurative language in a series of paintings on the theme of the family, which culminated in some large works done on the MA Fine Art course in Barcelona in 1997/8. After this I moved to London, and felt the need for a more concrete subject and specificity for my work. I turned to the immediate urban environment, and began using my own photographs as source material.
I do not attempt to replicate the conventions of photography. In
all representational art there is a gap between what is depicted
and how it’s depicted. The peculiar pleasures of painting, for
me, are all about this gap.
I use a glossy liquid paint which brings out the flashes of bright
colour that animate urban space. The fluidity, coarseness and
texture of the paint contribute to a sense of the thickening of
the air in the urban atmosphere, the ambiguity and the discontinuity
of visual experience.
The paintings vary in scale, from the series of small paintings
- “Street Scenes”, “Family Scenes” - to medium and larger canvases.
In some of the more recent paintings I have used a ‘widescreen’
format, where the street is treated as a spectacle
or tableau with people spread across it as if in a frieze. I tend
to conceive of individual paintings as parts of a more or less
coherent series, a group of variations around a theme. These
strategies are all based in my feeling for the tension between
the structure of painting and a visual e xperience that is fleeting,
ambiguous, unfixed. |
