Richard:
These images were taken last Friday evening in the studio, no one was there but me and the mood sort of took me. I had decided that the sticks I have been painting needed to be a little more representative of the actual task of handling them and applying pencil / paint to them – a lot of the work is process led here, much like the work of Ross too. A mark repeated again and again to build up a pattern on a surface – these particular surfaces are thin and long, there is more trajectory than on a wider squarer page.
In fact, here is a good point to say a few words about the resourcing of materials chosen for the show – much of it is acquired from the streets or from renovated kitchens, left over bits of wood or old dusty forgotten coffee tables. The application of pattern to these objects is concurrently derivative of the small pencil drawings and their depicted interiors as well as representative of a way of working I left behind for some reason a few years ago – that being mark after mark after measured mark.
It is this other way of working I think that first brought me and Ross together – it marked, if you will, the beginnings of this project. I remember we sat together at the CCA and just asked each other about one another’s work, and it soon became evident that Ross applies similar methods in his work to the methods I used to use to fill a page. Now, thanks to Ross I have got back to this root in my work and found that a similar process can be used to alter ready made or found objects, re-contextualising them / making them in to props / suggesting their painterly consequences…
It is also interesting to comment here on how much these images are muted and edited. The original shot show the whole of my studio space that houses at the moment a lot of other work that is planned for the exhibition: this work I have chosen not to show here! It is not a reluctance I do not think, more of a careful choice. The black and white helps in this stripping down of context – its more about the document or the evidence. The greyscale edge also makes another link back to the drawings themselves.
