28 August 2013

I try to make sense of what it is to be alive now, here, in the days that we live through.  I see in the media reports of the economic crisis, reports of the politics of selfishness and greed, news of wars, of the continuing acts of careless and intentional cruelties done to other people, the environment, animal life;  at the same time in this never-ending hash of muddle and compromise there is always human hopefulness for better ways to be found.  There is always a hopefulness for a more truthful, better world.

In my paintings I endeavour to say something about these wider concerns that surely many of us think about, often.  Simultaneously I aim to include personal experience of the everyday.  Some of what lies in my mind when I go about making paintings goes something like this:  it might be the experience of walking down a street and noticing in a hundred unspecific and quite ordinary ways, as you might do on many days of your life, the sunlight and the air in the street, or if it was a cloudy day how the air seemed softened and full, and you were conscious of the space as you passed through it and how it surrounded you.  You saw in tiny seconds of habitual recognitions how the space gave way to the parked cars, the pavements, the houses, the trees, and how it flowed up to become the sky, the atmosphere, even the envelope of the earth, while all the while you were carrying in your consciousness the awareness of your immediate material concerns, the time, your destination, your hurry, the economic global crisis, say, or climate change.

I like the idea of my work as being in some way a diary of my time here, on this earth.  It is an account of being alive in 2013.  In the surfaces of my paintings I might incorporate scraps of text from the media and I reference the pixelations of the ubiquitous technologically/mechanically reproduced image through which we gather so much of our information about modern life.  For me colour is an expressive element, another means for communication, while at the same time it retains its formal role.

The act of making a painting takes time and care.  It is a sign of attention having been paid, it is a manifestation of thought and of truthfulness and sincerity.  A painting is articulated in a language that is unique to itself, a language that permits the statement to stand discrete, undespairing, hopeful, embodying the unmistakeable trace of what it is to be human.

Discover and follow me with Wychwood Art selling affordable art online and in their art gallery in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire.