I have been working on a brief statement to appear alongside my work in the exhibition… Slightly confused about which tense to be writing in, first person seems wrong, yet nothing else seems to work either. I’m trying to keep it to the point, so that people might actually have a read…
I’m sure it’ll be reworded and jiggled around many more times, but for now, here it is!
“Surface brushmarks are obviously a hindrance to the illusion of realism”. – Glenn Brown.
My work attempts to bring together ideas of traditional, expressive painting with contemporary processes and reproduction, to create an image that deals with both pictorial depiction and abstract, gestural mark making, juxtaposed alongside mechanical re-presentation. My paintings often play out as a battle between these two opposing concepts, employing surface illusion, and encouraging the onlooker to question what they’re seeing, while exploring surfaces that aren’t necessarily what they seem. The work sets to critique the grounds of representation, commenting on ideas of appropriation, originality and imitation.
The paintings are about process and expression, yet I like to hide the process, and play with images that aren’t all they seem. I aim to remove the evidence of hand-made gesture, leaving a painting devoid of any trace of human intervention, and denying it’s own physical presence. This creates a painting in which every brush stroke reveals the nature of its application, every repetition is matched by an irregularity, and every mark betrays the fact that it is handmade. Still, the mark itself has lost all originality and expression by the way in which it is mechanically created. The paintings demand to be seen or read as a photograph or digital screen, yet conversely have their own physical presence. They encourage the viewer to explore the possibilities of pictorial originality within painting, in what is seen as the age of digital media and mechanical reproduction.
