I did not think that I would end up as an artist whose primary medium was paint. I spent my first year of collage making installations or Marquette’s for installations, animations and performance pieces influenced by the Fluxus movement, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramavitch.

I discovered paint when I joined a studio group who were mostly painters I suppose but I was not influenced by them. I think the attraction came about from upping my gallery visits and being exposed to a rich stream of independent contemporary exhibitions in this country, Poland, Germany and France and realizing that painting, for many centuries, has been about putting paint on a support and essentially not much has changed.

Even the scholarly message was that of a painting being concerned with surface, two dimensions, perspective and illusion, but a painting is so much more, or perhaps much less than these historical concerns.

Maurice Denis said ‘...that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’. If one extends this thinking a painting is also some wood, canvas, nails, staples and then paint, image, title and signature. It has a real depth to it in the thickness of the stretcher and it exists in space albeit as a rule pinned to a wall. The point is that a painting can be considered as a three dimensional object, and that it’s placement in a gallery is an installation, it’s physicality a sculpture, it’s documentation a photograph and it’s critique a work of pros. A painting when viewed thus transcends many forms of artistic media and is not just a pretty image but is Fluxus, Ono and Abramavitch. A concept

I have a 60 year old print of Deddon Mill by John Constable in a gilt frame. It is a forerunner to the popular ’your photos onto canvas’ process we see so much these days except that this is actually a photo stuck onto a canvas. This is a whole other issue regarding what a painting might be but let me just deal with the image. My reproduction was done by (Name to Follow) and the main difference is that having produced the flat image the process was then to paint over it with a clear resin to give the effect of a textured paint surface. It occurred to me that paint has other qualities rather than just being flat, that it could be worked away from the support and in fact might not even need a support to be used successfully.

So there is my concept for painting. My initial approach to making paintings was to deconstruct the conventional painting in order to reconstruct it in a new way which initially led the work in the direction of breaking the boundaries between painting and 3D media.

The rationale was that a painting is a three dimensional object and when the element of image, the 2 dimensional aspect of the painting, is devalued by raising the importance of elements such as wood, canvas, paint, title, concept, history and the space it exists in, the conventional painting takes on a different form. This allowed the exploration of paint, the qualities of paint and the process of using conventional oil and acrylic paint as well as newer paint products.

As my work has progressed it has not strayed far from this initial investigation and the flexibility of the reconstruction of the elements of painting has allowed me to chose what to put in and leave out, what to accentuate and what to subdue.

I think this is an important consideration when viewing my paintings that have a clear concern with image. Image is just what it is meant to be, a façade, a look and an outward show and it obscures the existence of a concept or a philosophy to the painting as well as hiding all the physical elements needed before the image can be produced. Like a face covered by makeup it is a lie that betrays the reality.

Did I mention philosophy?

However the work comes back to the element of painting which is concerned with the image and draws on the historical aspects of Impressionism, Trompe d’oeil and Surrealism to produce a form of post modern impressionism. We are often presented with a pixelated image in modern media and our now natural reaction is to narrow the eyes in order to blur the colours and see the image. This was mooted by the impressionist painters 150 years ago. The modern audience have a further viewing aid at their disposal in the camera screen and notably the mobile phone camera. It is at this point of the experience that the viewer may become directly involved with the painting by altering the way in which they view it.
Viewed through this the small image becomes sharper and there is to option of recording the image and sending it by text, thus making that which is individual accessible to the mass.

With these fundamental principles I have the flexibility in my work to create abstracts or I am able to consider the imagery and comment on a specific aspect of society.

The paintings bring together the traditions of painting and new technology by starting with a computer generated sketch. This computer generated image is in a sense the end of the process. It acts as a pattern that could be given to a technician and then painted. However the act of painting takes the image away from being a mass produced image back to the unique.
From this developed the philosophy of anti Pop which revokes the ideas of mass produced culture and identifies the individual as being important and unique.

Taking subjects directly from the Pop genre and considering the processes of printing, a life comparison was made. It is not the designed mass produced image that is the most interesting, it is the images at the beginning of the print run that are off register and unique. The paintings therefore, took on the look of an unregistered print.

The paintings begin to discuss cultural, political and moral issues relating to the importance of the development of the individual and the Self, rather than the forced development en mass to meet socio-political needs as defined by industry and economics.
 
This discussion could be furthered as a contemplation of the needs of the Self to develop beyond the corporeal to find an individual route to the spiritual connection with humanity as a whole. To explore the sense of ‘spirit’ now appearing in the work a reassessing of the work so far identified a meditative aspect to painting that takes the painting further away from the mass produced and into a slower contemplative process similar to Buddhist ‘Thanka’ paintings.
This process entails laying down layers of paint and then sanding back. In this process the painting takes on a different quality because of the way it is physically connected with. It is constantly turned, layer flat and hung up, before, in some cases being etched into and in some cases over painted.

It is not too unexpected that having explored spirituality by means of painting, that a certain amount of text would follow. It is in looking at the Self, the Human Condition and therefore the state of society, politics and religion that one has to consider where the artist and art stands in relation to these. These considerations have lead to a book produced in collaboration with artist Mike Coombs