This latest work has grown out of my art that has essentially gone wrong.
When tidying up my studio I came across a few medium sized blank canvases. In an ‘experimental, waste not, want not’ kind of mood, I spray painted these with different colour paints that I had found among my supplies. The outcome was a lot shinier than I expected and I did think at the time, they probably were not really a suitable surface for the image transference process that I was about to undertake – nevertheless, I tried anyway.
Not surprisingly, each of the canvases ended up looking nothing like they should have – bits of paper were coming off willy-nilly and whole lumps of the transferred imagery just disappeared into oblivion.
I sat on my floor of my studio studying the result intently. If I squinted my eyes and didn’t look too closely, the effect was actually rather interesting. This set me off deliberately tearing more bits of paper off and drawing and painting into the resulting disarray with ink and oil paint.
I did my normal trick of turning the canvas around to shake each canvas from its positional context. I let my imagination do its thing, using what I could see in front of me to springboard my ideas into a new place, making shapes and patterns out of the mess and then further using painting to spiral me elsewhere. It is an intuitive and emotional process and it is also experimental and analytical. It is a constant process of do, stop and look, do, stop and look, and in-between these moments, daydream and imagine. There is no grand unveiling but rather a continuous movement – the peeling and uncovering of layer after layer, the adding of marks to further transform. The rough edges and indistinct imagery reshape and redefine the canvas time and time over as my fingers translate what my imagination lets me see.
