My practice engages with the painted mark as both gesture and a very slippery kind of representation
2 What do you intend your work to convey to an audience?
In mediaeval times the monster was used as a symbolic tool with which to investigate substance, existence and form and it serves a similar purpose within my work. I play with the notion of the ‘perfect cannibal’, that which eats itself, and rather than being destroyed, is able to metamorphose and go beyond ‘nature’. Dysfunctional, envious matter watching the human world and trying to create some kind of approximation to a body.
3 Why do you work in your chosen medium and format?
I work with oil paint , it offers depth of colour and flexibility: able to hold the delicacy of mark and flow with clarity within a glaze medium. I work on mdf or aluminium supports as canvas is too absorbent and the clarity of the mark is lost.
4 Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ?
I work with a process of laying down an area of paint with as little conscious thought as possible, moving the paint around until a form emerges out of the paint which interests me, or has an emotional charge to it. This process often includes repeatedly wiping back until the ‘form’ emerges, often out of the areas of absence.
5 Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work?
I don’t directly look to works of art for inspiration, however I can see the presence of Renaissance type landscape within my work, I find myself looking at the backgrounds of paintings and what lies behind the religious or mythical central figures. The work of the Hudson River Group and their transcendent landscapes, Max Ernst springs to mind and certain works by El Greco, Fra Angelico, Goya, Frederic Church.
6 What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you?
Film and literature influence my work much more directly than painting. Films: the figure of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness, and Dr. Moreau (The Island of Dr. Moreau), Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs), the Alien films, Terminator. Books on mutation theory, deformity, monstrosity (particularly David Williams, Deformed Discourse), biblical and mythological figures/imagery, biological and geological systems, Gaia Theory (James Lovelock), science fiction literature (eg ‘Solaris’, Stanislaw Lem).
7 What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience?
What stimulates the work (apart from what’s mentioned above) is music - I am unable to work without it. It helps close down the mind.
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?
See question 6. I don’t use visual source material in a direct way. I absorb it and then I see what emerges out of the paint.. I am interested in the paradox, that by not thinking, new thoughts become apparent.
9 What are the main problems that you face in making your work?
Time – the process is slow. Physical restrictions on weight of materials and standardised sheet sizes. Ceiling not high enough in studio.
10 Where do you intend to take your work from here?
Who knows