STATEMENT OF WORK

I don’t know anything other than a gestalt feeling. The action of painting is not a way of capturing an already thought of image. It is more a preoccupation with a formal situation, where I have a forward motion towards a kind of pictorial drama - I may want line to be the main actor or I want to give a figure too much length, or this time an atomic white is the substance that legs and arms will surface from. A painting then becomes a series of stutterings towards that single action. I think of the surface of a painting as an atmosphere where physical forces urge each other; weightiness, cubeness, stretched-outness, a matrix of marks that sucks things in and spits things out. Any suggested object is a thing to play with in that force field, the objects are figures mostly, because then the distortion imposed by the abstract force field is more obvious, it can register clearly as a rupture, a lumpen solid form highjacks the still. Quieter fields with no clear figuration allow for the solid figures to vibrate, moments where the drama subsides. 

Distortion as a force is important. When drawing a figure I do not want anatomical accuracy. I want incorrect proportions, extreme perspectives, mirroring, gaps between my memory of a figure and the real thing, a jump when a collaged cut through figure meets another body. They are all opportunities for intersections. I appreciate early renaissance distortion in perspectives of buildings - they offer a perspective that feels closer to reality somehow, a simultaneous view where all rooms are seen at once because they can be seen in the mind all at once. Figurative and bodily memories are not whole and clean and defined, but slippery and morphing. In our own bodily relations we have dominant and passive body parts or positive and skewed connections to those body parts - a left hand we use often, the sudden awareness of legs in a bath and realising they haven’t been seen for weeks, an imagined giant silhouette that has no correlation to reality. My right hip is arthritic and less mobile and in my mind a smaller form than the rest. Painting is a place where I can convey the body in its psychological state rather than an outer world reality. 

When I am painting, spoken language is more present than I previously thought. Bodily words and bodily states can be circling in the form of single words when I’m in the studio, these are repeated in my mind and almost irritatingly repetitive. Hardened. Entombed. Soft. Muscular. Opening. These words correlate with simple formal facts of a hardened strong line, or a soft-focus undefined pool of colour. 

Drawings play a major role. I start with illustrations of microbes/enlarged cells or arbitrary found forms in paintings, a Michelangelo painting cut up into multiple tiny views, or actual encounters, the bend of someone's leg on a train or my child’s shoulder blades reminding me of how close bones lie under the skin. When beginning a painting these tiny observations are enlarged, brought up close, anthropomorphised, dramatized to act out some abject, hyper situation. I picture them giving what is invisible new bodies. Sometimes it feels oblique and on a knife edge of not actually existing at all. I sometimes zoom right in to these dramas and other times want more of a general map or diagram of parts that lets solid form rise and fall.