This is complicated. I want to improve on what exists.
2 What do you intend your work to convey to an audience?
It is an effect or an engagement that absorbs the viewer; this can work on a number of levels. An immediate seduction and then the ability to extend an interest, this may be through elements that aren’t that noticeable immediately, but then can reveal themselves through historic references or as the viewer accesses the work. The objects may act as a portal to another state. Evoke unease pleasure or make the viewer consider their existence and relation to objects, this probably entertains the audience too. It’s like a theme park for intellectuals.
3 Why do you work in your chosen medium and format?
I like to use a new material; the material can suggest ways of working. I like to make paintings that become sculptures and make sculptures to paint from.
4 Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ?
Colour relationships, harmony and dissonance. Surface and form are really fundamental. I use a whole cupboard load of mediums.
I work as a technician for galleries and artists, matching mixing colour, constructing frames and hanging/installing. This gives me a direct access to other practices that I would not necessarily consider.
Moulds and casting I picked up from a television set builder called Steve White, and I use boatbuilding techniques which was my first job in Cornwall.
5 Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work?
A whole plethora and films too - Romero, Lynch, Loach, Lee, Bergmann and Antonioni.
In fact most of the history art. This can be the colour of films, the sequences that creates a feeling.
The Supremretists, the Constructivists, De Stijl. I want to live in a neo modern uber silo.
Artists such as Duchamp, Judd, Rothko, Motherwell, Yves Tanguy, Beuys, Kippenberger, Thomas Schutte, Gavin Turk, Giorgio Morandi, Chardin, Ingres, Giacometti - he was a Surrealist and Cubist.
The old guys Turner, Lorain, Gainsborough. The even older ones too like Rubens, Goya, Tintoretto, Titian and Byzantine Mosaics.
This manifests itself in an appropriation of the idea and a subversion of the object that destabilizes the myth of suspension of belief in the object. It doesn’t reinvent the object but may question the hierarchy of revered artists.
6 What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you?
The books ‘Art and Objecthood’ by Michael Fried, Formalist ideas of Greenberg and David Sylvester are real mental gymnasiums.
Talking to artists really gets me going. Sometimes I can work like a man possessed. I feel this is total absorption and it rarely occurs - this trance like state is perhaps a result.
7 What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience?
Although my work is a lot about landscape, I haven’t really done these from life. I have climbed and walked up some mountains and travelled to the desert, but not recently. Oxford Street is more familiar to me than Mount Olympus. With the portraits it’s a lot to ask to get someone to sit, so I try to work from photos or 3-d objects.
An artist is someone who can change your life; Not an interior decorator, although there is an art to this. I try to read about art from a variety of sources, theory, Greek myths, novels and songs.
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?
Popular culture and the vintage retro fashion thing are really big at the moment. Music references, lyrics or songs and melody and rhythm are real big ones.
9 What are the main problems that you face in making your work?
My lack of technical knowledge limits making sculpture. I am no master or expert, so I use a punk DIY approach. Costs, space and the time of art practice is a nightmare, fear of failure. Art can become too self centred and egotistical. However it’s fulfilment that acts as a counterbalance. I don’t think there’s much else to do really.
What worries me is the direct relation of art production to the market. This means commodity sales become incentive for production and this is a dangerous plot.
There are many artists that talk confidently about their work, but the ideology is new age tripe.
10 Where do you intend to take your work from here?
Well I think collaboration is really important, it’s not a solo effort.
I don’t know until I have started making new work. I don’t think about Jurgen Habermas or Kantian Philosophy when I am mixing orange. I am intending to copy painting from the national gallery, alongside other projects like reconstructing historical art events.
Maybe just taking things as far as they can go.