Processes - Painting
I have maintained oil painting as an ongoing aspect of my practice since 2003. Ultimately, I see all painting methods as working with ‘coloured mud’, yet it has suited my purposes to use the properties of oil paint to extend a dialogue I might have with an image over long periods of time.
Oil painting has challenged my need to fully explore the nuances of an image’s materialisation, while maintaining the spontaneous production of works on paper and sculpture alongside. I learn from the way the different working processes relate.
Painting with oil provides a more substantial support, gradual drying times, varieties of surface and the possibilities of endless layering. All this at first engaged my attention in meditative ways that both slowed the development of an image while opening it up to subtleties in terms of how it might exist in an imagined space.
Gradually it is enabling me to manipulate imagery in a variety of ways, as I continue to test diversity in application of the medium. I am wary of prescriptive approaches and prefer to allow multiformity to evolve into distinctive modalities over time, without conscious effort. But I do work to ensure that each shift in style and content within my painting has been adequately investigated before undergoing further development.
I build up paintings in layers, recording the development of an idea in various forms upon the surface, over-painting and rubbing back, until some distillation of an original vague notion reveals itself in an unchanging way.
Sometimes paintings are removed from my sight for up to six months, drying and gestating until I am able to see them with new eyes and bring them to fruition.
Sometimes they fail me beyond hope of redemption, overworked and unable to communicate their essence.
I consider the unsuccessful pictures as important in allowing discoveries in later works, accommodating the necessity of misjudgment in order to take the right chances.
My painting practice is the contemplative exercise in which I merge ideas developed in other areas, but also explore disconnected new forms and speculate about what is yet to come. For that reason, different series of images have different pictorial functions in a similar way to those operating throughout my works on paper.
Explore the Processes
2. Collaborative Participation
6. Painting (You Are Here)
