Fall rise, acrylic & oil on board, 18 x 18", 2011
What are you working on in your studio
right now?
I
have just finished the last of a group of small acrylic and oil paintings on
board which I am about to show at Transition Gallery in London opening December
2nd. I have done 25+ since August and am happy with 10 of them of
which the painter Phillip Allen who is curating the show will choose his
favourite 5. Two other painters, Mark Joyce and William
Gharrie are also showing work. It should be a
good one.
Can you describe your working routine?
I try
and find any excuse not to paint! So I get up early in order to accommodate my
excuses, and get these ‘necessary things’ out of the way: I go to the shop for
the paper, drink coffee, watch breakfast television, read Facebook and any
Emails and reply (in detail) to any (thank God I have kept away from Twitter!),
eat some toast, have ‘just one more coffee’ etc. etc. until there really isn’t
anything left to do except go and paint.
I paint in the garage at home so when I do go
to paint I start straight away. There is no sitting around, no chatting (there’s
no one to chat to), no drawing or preparation as that gets done in the house at
other times and I know roughly how I’m going to get going, so I just start.
With these small paintings I paint very quickly and intensely in about one and
a half hour bursts. I usually get about 3 of these intense painting bursts done
a day, give or take.
I
don’t know why it’s always one and a half hours at the moment but it is. Bigger
paintings take longer but that’s nothing to do with them being harder to do. With
big paintings the paint application involves a bigger area which takes longer
to fill, and you only see the whole of the painting by pausing and stepping
back so the whole process takes longer.
Marker on acetate, 2011
Can you describe your studio space and
how, if at all, that affects your work?
I am
a very untidy messy painter. Once I get going I can’t keep stopping and
starting to keep my stuff organized and orderly as it breaks up my thinking. I
seem to always have a tin of brush restorer on the go as I lose brushes in the
mess and when they reappear they are hard! I am my own worst enemy but I have tried
to change and keep tidy and it just isn’t me. There is no natural light in the
garage but that has never bothered me as my paintings don’t rely on subtlety
much (not to me anyway). Also, it’s a good test if the paintings can stand out
surrounded by mess and lit by strip lighting. This doesn’t mean they should
gravitate towards being bright and garish – more that they somehow are more
alive, a special arrangement of the matter they have come from, i.e. the mess which
is all rounds them.
Tell me about your process, where things
begin, how they evolve etc.
I get
ideas from anything I might see, think about, read, watch on television, and I distill
all this into drawing, mainly in my sketchbook, most often at night – watching
television. These days I need a specific idea to start a painting from and
these come from the drawings. When I say ‘idea’ this is a very loose term. It
could be just a colour or pattern or a real thing I want to paint, a memory or
something stupid, anything really, but mainly from the drawings.
I
used to paint like I draw – just making it up and seeing where it goes, but now
I need an anchor point or two. With drawing it’s just about doodling until an
idea takes shape, then making this idea clear, then that’s it – the drawing is
finished. There are no changes other than additions because it is biro or ink
pen, so I can’t fuss over it erasing like you can with pencil or paint. Any
mistakes have to be made into a positive influence to the drawing somehow and
this often sends the drawing off on a different tangent. Drawing isn’t a problem;
it’s just using my imagination, getting ideas out, playing with them to make
something new and making them clear. This would be enough but paint and colour
are special and addictive. Once enough drawings are done to generate ideas for
about a dozen paintings, I start painting.
When
I paint, like drawing I just want to get my imagination working, playing with
ideas, going off on tangents etc. I don’t want to refine and polish what I know,
but I do want to paint with the least resistance possible and still end up with
something I haven’t seen before, that surprises me, and puzzles me and that I
learn from. But what stops me doing this,
the resistance, was (and is) the making of the painting: the adjustment of
colour, the relationships of shapes, the edge of the painting, dealing with
painting as being flat but a real space., etc. etc.
Some
artists ignore these problems, but to me dealing with them and trying to get
past to a new thing is the whole point. In trying to do this painting is
stopped from stagnating and ending up in a dead end, and becoming at best the painting
equivalent of a tribute band.
It’s only been in this last year or so that I
have started getting somewhere I think. I have started relaxing a bit, thinking
of each painting not having to be perfect, the be all and end all but just as one
of a series. This lets me be more playful because if it fails its OK, there is
always another painting. I have began painting on large boards with 5 or 6
‘areas’ of painting which each have their own start off idea but with no fixed
edges. This lets me just concentrate on using my imagination, playing with the
ideas etc. I can work on all these areas of painting at once and they sometimes
merge or split so it’s a very fluid process.
Along
the way I photograph the work if I am not sure of something and try changes
using the computer. But these are only big changes, or collaging separate
paintings together or dramatic colour tests. Eventually the areas of paint
become clearer in what they are trying to say to me and more separate from each
other. I then cut them up and work on them as separate paintings and only then consider
things like the edge, how the space is working etc. But these final decisions
are painted in a much less panicked way as most of the paintings main idea(s)
and its structure is there. Recently I have gone back to making paintings with
edges on fixed sizes again and it feels a lot less frustrating now.
before & after
What are you having the most trouble
resolving?
Reading
my description of this process of painting sounds like all things are resolved and
sorted. They aren’t! The hardest thing to resolve and which I am a long way off
doing, is to try and develop an approach that allows me to paint anything, any
subject or idea, without having to be detached; so I am painting from the heart
as well as the mind, with equal measure.
Do you experiment with different materials
a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?
Poster
paints were the first paints I used and my earliest memory is of painting in
front of the fire a ‘mural’ on some wallpaper of the local park for my sister
who was at university and I was off school poorly with the mumps. My sister
still has it and the ‘mural’ is actually only about 2 foot long, but me being 4
or 5 I can’t have been much longer either, so it still seems in my memory to
have been huge! The poster paints were in small glass bottles by Rowney and
were pre-mixed. You can’t get them in glass bottles now but I still love using
pre-mixed pots of poster paint for their smell and their squidgyness which you
can’t get from acrylic and gouache – although I use those as well now. I use
oils with Turpentine and Jacksons Glaze Medium which gives a lovely glow to the
paint without it being like a varnish and makes it flow better and dry quicker.
I
pretty much just draw with black biro and ink pens but recently I have been
drawing on large A1 sheets of acetate with permanent marker pens and using nail
varnish remover as an eraser. This is great as you can draw on both sides and
reverse the image and draw but also rub out and leave a trace of the rubbing,
and also rub out perfectly if you want, so it’s a bit like painting but also
like ink drawing.
As I
say I also use the computer to test out large changes to paintings without
ruining them. I also have a Nintendo DS and got the ‘Art Academy’ for it which
is a brilliant little paint program – lots of fun. It’s the only paint program
I know of that has great painting sound effects! Unfortunately you can’t get
images printed from it so I will probably get an iPad at some point.
Ink on paper, 2011
What does the future hold for this work?
I want
to do lots of different things which I have been thinking about over the last
year and will give me a break from my ‘usual’ painting, which I can then come
back to later next year ‘refreshed’. I want to make some sculpture on a flat
board like a model railway landscape using plaster of Paris, bandaging, clay,
plastic – anything. Like a diorama to be able to do what I want with. I don’t
think it will be a thing in itself, viewed from any angle like a sculpture or
installation. It might be just in a corner viewed from one angle. I might do
landscape paintings from it. I also want a digital projector to be able to
paint more accurate areas on my paintings but without having to slow down and
worry about accuracy. I want to use photographs, my own drawings and paintings,
and I want to be able to use it to do things that are impossible any other way
like photographing a half finished painting, then projecting it onto itself and
painting itself into itself recursively, and distorting itself somehow in
between maybe using the computer. I also want to try painting on the acetate
sheets I have and seeing what happens there with reversing them and layering
and tracing etc. I have been painting all my adult life but I am still in the
dark quite a bit about what’s out there in terms of materials and methods and
have been recommended a couple of books on the subject which I want to read.
Is there anything else you would like to
add?
It’s
great to have been asked to write this. I don’t normally put all this down in
words and only occasionally talk like this to others, as do most artists I
think. I hope it sort of makes sense!
Desert, acrylic & oil on board, 12 x 12", 2011
