Statement

You will each see something different in my paintings. Layers of paint that look like rock formations, some revealing a riot of colour inside, others hiding formations that lurk beneath the surface.

Maps, faces, silhouettes, quarries, coral reefs, hairbreadth fissures. You will see what your eyes will want you to see.

My work is a constant interplay between foreground and background; between what is seen and what is left unseen; between the visible and the hidden; between surface and depth. This duality is the line through all of my work.

My work is both painting and sculpture. 

Painting is additive :  layers build upon each other to create height, breadth and depth. 

Sculpture is subtractive : material is removed from the canvas to reveal hidden form.

These approaches are not necessarily contradictory. Adding and subtracting plays a role in everything we do.

My technique is both organic and machine, human and industrial. I apply paint with my bare hands and I strip it away with a sanding machine, or the sharp blade of a scalpel.

My work is always the product of a thousand decisions, some conscious and many unconscious. Intention is always in tension with intuition.

I consciously decide what colours will greet the canvas, and think painstakingly about how these colours interact with one another. I create colour through a process of careful calibration; mixing, heating, and reducing them to create the right shade, and viscosity.

In contrast, intuition guides me when priming a canvas. I apply thick slathers of gesso and spread it freely with my bare hands. 

The hot and creamy paint is fluid at this point, open and persuadable to being applied in varying thicknesses, anywhere on the canvas. 

These first moments of creation give me a feel for dimension and scale. That is why I need to be in physical contact with the surface of the canvas. 

Then the first contours begin to appear. I sense these through sight, not touch.

Sometimes they resemble natural structures like trees or rivers. 

Sometimes they emerge as the silhouettes of human figures in dialogue with one another, or in solemn contemplation. Sometimes they take an indescribable form, which opens up another path. 

What is always known, is that soon this boundless fluidity will harden and set. In the minutes where the Gesso undergoes a change of states, I begin to pace around the canvas searching for clues, observing the foundation of the painting taking form. 

In English we use the idiom “to watch paint dry” as doing something that is very boring. In my work, watching the paint dry is to see it change states, from a fluid to a solid, and the beginning of tectonic forms taking shape in a new artwork. 

It is anything but boring. 

Observing these emerging patterns in the foundational fluid, liberally applied to the canvas that holds it. 

It is the beginning of a journey, where the first signs emerge and the first paths begin to form.

Soon different layers of paint will be applied, and the painting will begin its journey of invention and reinvention; of constitution and reconstitution; of formation and erosion; of revelation and concealment. 

I scrape layers off, or sand them down, to different depths and at different points on the canvas. Some are reapplied, some are not. I sometimes hoover up fragments of dried paint from the floor to reuse them-  they are given a second life - rejoining the painting from which they were riven.