It is the only way to try and make sense of the condition of life.
2 What do you intend your work to convey to an audience?
I don't paint for an audience, but I strongly feel that if I can imbue the work with the work with the 'visually poetic', the audience will empathetically respond. What do I wish to convey? Some sense of trying to find an emotional/ personal space in this infinite and strange universe.
3 Why do you work in your chosen medium and format?
There is something very direct and organic in the painting process. One is creating sometimes a very real space using coloured clay on woven cloth. I always relate to the words of Guston in a film of him talking where he says that when you are in the studio you have to forget, forget family, friends, bills, deadlines, the rest of the world and then you can truly paint. Then the painting paints you as much as you paint the painting. it is an intensely personal experience.
4 Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ?
The painting starts as an abstract randomness, then images are coerced together to form some sense. I have a large store of imagery, from random graphics, information books, personal photos, artists work, postcards etc., i also go out and draw specific places and objects and dress myself, wife and children up and draw/ photograph them in various poses. The initial idea or vision of a painting is strong at the start, the visuals will change as the work grows organically but the feel stays the same. Devices, anything that comes to hand. I paint on the floor, dribble and blow paint, scrap with card, soft brushing, turn it upside-down. But always a mixture of chance and control
5 Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work?
Bosch, Breughel, Cranach, Altdorfer,Watteau, Klee, the symbolists ( Bocklin/ redon) and surrealists ( Magritte/ Ernst). Particularly like northern renaissance. The aforementioned artists create intimate worlds that are very inhabitable but unattainable. Much yearning. Much stillness. There are areas in painting and devices that directly reference artists work, the garden of earthly delights, the harlequins in Watteau, scale in Magritte, Europe after the Rain(Ernst).
6 What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you?
What is time , what is the universe, what is the stuff that we create in our heads. Currently interested in much new physics, when I can get my head around the maths, the sense of changing understanding of time and reality. The fact that through quantum physics there are many dimensions. the idea that time does not exist, it is just a series of presents. The cyberworld and where these digital worlds we are creating exist. Where does our own mind start and stop, what is imagination, imaginative space, real space, emotive space. How can we create our utopias, are they significant. We are the same stuff as stars are made of, do our utopias reflect the infinite?
7 What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience?
Very directly my family and the woods that surrounds me. Moments of personal epiphany that come in my waking and sleeping hours. Every year or so I am lucky to have a humdinger of a dream, prophetic in nature, and the feeling/ seeming message of the dream will inform work for the next year or so.
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?
I think answered this question in Q4
9 What are the main problems that you face in making your work?
Trying to put too much in. Knowing when to stop. Actually having good criticism. As I work in relative isolation I need to have that other person who says stop, good, bad.
10 Where do you intend to take your work from here?
I don't feel I have intent, but lord it can and must always grow. The act of making work changes it as new lands are found, terra incognita. I feel some of the questions in Q.6 are what I am interested in and are definitely starting to inform the new work more directly. The work itself seems to go cyclical, too tight, just right, too loose, just right, too tight etc.,