There are various things that happen when I create my art, a place where my brain goes to, a kind of daydream. These imperfect patterns I have been creating which not only act as a backdrop to the collages I produce, but exemplify for me the various tropes and themes associated with philosophical ideas surrounding the fragment – juxtaposition, interconnection, absence, transformation, unity, exactitude to name a few.
I also think about other visual artists which my art may have been informed by. It is not as if I consciously make work trying to incorporate other artist’s ideas. It is more that as I make my work, another artist’s work may spring to mind as I think ‘oh, so and so likes to explore this kind of thing too’. An example of this is Sonia Delaunay. One might look at her art and see it’s a far cry from my own but she clearly used to get obsessed with creating patterns with lots of colours. Another is Paul Klee, especially his little block patterned watercolours.
I was intending to concentrate on pattern in my recent work but I also have become rather focused on colour. I have been scouring interior and building design books, specifically the icon style series (from different countries and cities) and looking at the variations of colour combinations – walls, accessories, doorways, plants for example and these have influenced the choices I have made. Interior design is my own particular fetish and ironically fetish is yet another trope associated with philosophical ideas about the fragment.
I have started to include collages of people within these patterns and colours. These are of people I have photographed as I make my journey on the bus to and from my art studio. Most of these people are on a journey themselves. The moment of their capture is transitory and elusive (I think of the photographer Saul Leiter here). Yet there is still a connection with the environment, with their surrounds, with other people and wildlife passing by. I like the idea that we are all part of the overall pattern and fabric of life, part of the ebb and flow of what exists and what doesn’t, no less or more important than anything else.
