1 What is/are the primary reason(s) for you to make work in the first place? I think that artists, in general, do what they do in order to learn something about themselves and the environment that they live in. In so doing, they also reveal who they are to the world at large. Of course there are different ways to do this. Jacques Louis David once said that art should influence conduct. One could argue that this approach to art making is very different to the more personal approach of Van Gogh, or the cynicism of Warhol, but in fact all approaches are personal. David cared deeply about the environment in which he lived, and played an active role in the politics of the French revolution. His paintings echo this, and reveal to us who he was as a person. The same could be said of Warhol. His work captures the mood of the time perfectly, and his cynical ‘hands-off’ approach reveals his character to us. Regardless of how well an artist captures the spirit of the time that they live in, or reveal who they are as a person, they cannot help but to do so in some degree or another. This suggests that all art can be deciphered in some way or another. Some types of art are more easily decipherable than others. For example, Goya’s “Third of May” is much easier to decipher than a painting by Robert Ryman. In my own work, the meanings that may be drawn from the paintings are not immediately apparent, and may require a certain degree of effort form the viewer to determine what I am trying to express. However, to those that do try I hope to not only reveal aspects about myself to the viewer, but also something about themselves. 2 What do you intend your work to convey to an audience? There’s no set message. Rather, I would like to influence the way the viewer might think by introducing elements into the work that have a familiar feel to them. This I hope to achieve by sourcing recognizable image genres from various (usually photographic) media-based archives and manipulating what is familiar with what is unusual or strange. In this way I hope to jolt the memory of the viewer into drawing up associations with what they are looking at that link them to images in the collective unconscious or memories from their own past. This is also aided by using aged source material such as daguerreotypes or 20th Century magazine imagery, which carries with it a certain nostalgia for things past. 3 Why do you work in your chosen medium and format? I think that I may have chosen to work almost exclusively in oil on canvas early on because of my love and respect for the great masters of the past such as Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh and Picasso. It was artists such as these that influenced my decision to become an artist in the first place, and though I have since obtained a much wider appreciation of artists and art practices, the medium that they most favoured must have been a decisive factor in my taking up the tradition of oil on canvas. 4 Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ? I start out by making up collages out of various found images. Sometimes a straightforward looking small portrait may contain as much as four or five different images used as source material. These may in turn reference different ages (in terms of photographic dates, or eras), or different emotional reactions from the point of view of the subject (the painted figure). What I mean by this is to combine conflicting aspects of different images that contain different narratives. By doing this I hope to create an ambiguity in the image that opens up different avenues of meaning. For example, when one looks at a snapshot of, say a laughing child, it is not only the mouth that indicates that the child is laughing. The eyes, cheeks, the position of the head, indeed the whole of the body plays a part in indicating that the image is of a laughing child. What then do we expect to happen when a painted figure may contain elements taken from photographic sources that conflict with each other? I’m not certain of the answer myself, but this is just one example of an experimental approach that I my use to make a painting. Once the collage is made and I am sufficiently satisfied with it, I transfer the image up onto a larger scale, onto canvas, using a soft pencil. The collage that I am working from will always be in black and white, and may have some notes of possible colour combinations that have occurred to me instinctively. Then I begin to paint the picture using a traditional method. Sometimes a picture will go through several colour combination changes if I am not immediately satisfied with the finished work. 5 Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work? I have a great deal of artistic influences, but none of them are very specific to my own work in terms of appearance. For example, I am very fond of early 19th Century French painting, such as that by Géricault, Gros, David, Ingres, and Delacroix for example. In particular the large-scale paintings by these artists that are on display at the Louvre, such as Gericaults ‘Raft of the Medusa’, Delacroix’s ‘Death of Sardanapalus’, David’s ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’, and others. A list of more recent artists that have meant a lot to me would include the likes of Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Sean Landers and Neo Rauch, among others. However, comparisons have been made between my work and artists such as John Currin and Michael Borremans. This is not in fact due to direct influence, but rather, I think down to a tendency to look back on bygone eras, which I am certainly subject to. To my mind though, this is the only similarity that we share, and all develop from this starting point in entirely different directions. 6 What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you? I think it’s impossible for an artist to not be influenced somehow by the world around them, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not. The world appears to be speeding up – the information that we get bombarded with every day, whether it is through images, sounds, or something else has the effect of confusing and nauseating us. The never-ending flow of banal information can sometimes make one feel that one is surrounded by an insane world. Although I don’t do it consciously, I believe that my paintings convey something of this, a mixture of the insane with the banal. 7 What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience? I have a tendency to want to record things that happen in my life, which may explain the desire for me to become an artist in the first place. Each painting I do can be seen as a diary entry for the person I was at that time. But I am also interested in history, and the past in general. This may explain my fascination with images, and particularly old images. There is something about a photographic portrait from say, 1850 that has an effect that you don’t get from a painted portrait of the same time. With the painting, what one sees is simply a representation, but the photograph captures something of the reality of that particular person and that particular time. This is not to denigrate the painting in any way, since paintings can also capture something of the reality of the sitter (think of certain portraits by Rembrandt, for example). But it’s a different kind of reality; one that I find stimulates me and spurs me on to want to produce work that captures something of this. It may be that in a painting this is impossible, but that doesn’t matter, since it is a starting point for me to explore such interests in the field of painting. 8 From where do you derive your other visual source material (i.e. non art historical) and how do you implement this material within your work? The source material that I use ranges from the earliest days of photography to 20th century magazine photography. These images are either obtained in flea markets, book fairs, or over the Internet. See the answer to question four for a description of how I implement these images in my work. 9 What are the main problems that you face in making your work? A painting can often be too highly finished. Abstract painters frequently come across the problem of knowing when to stop. Figurative painters can also have the same problem. It’s not so obvious as in the example of abstraction, but it’s there all the same. This is a problem that I have always been struggling with, and it’s noticeable if one were to look at my work chronologically. Some periods show a high degree of finish, whilst others show a more sketchy approach. I wouldn’t say that one way of working is preferable to the other, but when I am painting I always find it a fine line between being too sketchy or too highly finished. But then again, I think this is a problem common to most painters, and one that adds a little grit to the finished work, whether it is satisfactory to the artist or not. 10 Where do you intend to take your work from here? In the future I would like to expand my practice into more diverse areas that allow a greater freedom of expression. This need not only mean subjectively, but also technically. A contemporary example of this is Gerhard Richter, whose practice ranges in approaches in a quite radical way, yet the work always retains its identity as a ‘Richter’. Obviously I don’t intend to imitate what Richter is doing, I merely chose him as an example of the diverse approaches an artist can have at his disposal whilst remaining firmly true to himself and his vision.