Processes - Creating Images
The creative working process is laborious and ritualistic. Working with tactile materials is a necessary distraction for me. I scratch away at something to keep my body busy enough so that I am surprised where my mind wanders.
Working with the materials of art is like ‘earthing the thought’, creating a sense of anchorage in the world through interaction with matter. This completes a type of circuit that causes energy to be generated in the head.
This aspect of creation is fundamental and ongoing; whether it’s painting freely or sweeping the floor, I prefer to be ‘too busy to think’. At times it is necessary to concentrate every part of my attention on a minute drawing, and at others to test my physical limitations by creating oversized, ‘out of body’ works. One exists because of the other. One is not more important than the other.
Similarly, there are times when I need to work in a fluid medium to communicate free-flowing ideas, and then work in a medium with prescriptive limitations, such as woodcuts.
In paint, images are often amorphous or multi-dimensional; forms can hang suspended in an ambiguous space. This is in contrast to printmaking, where forms are deliberately put down on a surface in a way that acknowledges the fixed two dimensions of that surface.
I will at different stages work in high-key colours and monotonic shades, complex layers and sparsely rendered forms, often looking for the difference between a variety of images to most precisely locate what is on my mind.
I am more intrigued by losing myself in the development of work than by setting out with a preconceived idea that I might then project upon it. Open-ended images that can be accessed on multiple levels are the most influential in the gestation of my art. If something is not immediately communicating itself to me, if there is something I am not able to define, then I have the need to go on and investigate it.
In this sense the creative process is the means by which I navigate through spaces in my imagination that I do not know. At times it feels like travelling by night, with images providing points of illumination that show where to step next. It is more useful for me to keep active so that images are presented fairly constantly and I can use them to determine how to proceed, like the echo-location of a bat.
These various processes may be explored further by clicking on the links below.
Explore the Processes
1. Creating Images (You Are Here)