This statement reflects on how my studio practice has been re-established during this course of study; how its content, form, working methods and context have developed during this time.
The initial jolt, a challenge to what I'd done before, came when I showed ten years' worth of paintings in a new way. A single-minded focus on 'landscape' survived this experience, but specific motifs and sources were transformed.
My recent paintings still present anyone who views them with the existence of a place. The sort of place we fail to see every day. Not beautiful, by any means, but emphatically there. That there is something not nothing is the sublime fact that drives me.
In place of plein air observation I have lately substituted the recording and manipulation of video clips. Yet my choice finally to paint (in common with, say, Gerhard Richter and Dan Hays) signals that what is depicted - unlike the cursory photographic source - is not in the least bit throwaway. Worth more time, certainly, than it takes to press the 'record' button. Further, my exhibited work taken as a whole questions the imagery itself: how it does, or does not, capture the presence, the significance, the truth of the anonymous place it shows. Unselected experimental works in other media, curtailed by circumstances, have not progressed far enough to influence my main preoccupation, but they might... All this is excitingly new.
In the end, though, my paintings' focus remains firmly on a location as 'landscape', 'landscape-over-time' in the case of multi-part works. If some artists and critics are unready to rely on 'views' to lay hold of the richness of being-in a place, I am not hesitant to count myself among figurative painters who, whilst not holding on to everything, certainly capture more than what it looks like to be there.
If, unlike in earlier work, elements of these pictures appear given (dictated by the source), even if things appear bland or cold: no matter. This unremarked place - looked through, not at, by the (normally) thousands of people travelling past it each day - remains stubbornly there. Presented at different times, in different ways, and together, these views quietly celebrate that the world is not one overlookable thing but, wonderfully and without limit, this and this and this.
My recent paintings still present anyone who views them with the existence of a place. The sort of place we fail to see every day. Not beautiful, by any means, but emphatically there. That there is something not nothing is the sublime fact that drives me.
In place of plein air observation I have lately substituted the recording and manipulation of video clips. Yet my choice finally to paint (in common with, say, Gerhard Richter and Dan Hays) signals that what is depicted - unlike the cursory photographic source - is not in the least bit throwaway. Worth more time, certainly, than it takes to press the 'record' button. Further, my exhibited work taken as a whole questions the imagery itself: how it does, or does not, capture the presence, the significance, the truth of the anonymous place it shows. Unselected experimental works in other media, curtailed by circumstances, have not progressed far enough to influence my main preoccupation, but they might... All this is excitingly new.
In the end, though, my paintings' focus remains firmly on a location as 'landscape', 'landscape-over-time' in the case of multi-part works. If some artists and critics are unready to rely on 'views' to lay hold of the richness of being-in a place, I am not hesitant to count myself among figurative painters who, whilst not holding on to everything, certainly capture more than what it looks like to be there.
If, unlike in earlier work, elements of these pictures appear given (dictated by the source), even if things appear bland or cold: no matter. This unremarked place - looked through, not at, by the (normally) thousands of people travelling past it each day - remains stubbornly there. Presented at different times, in different ways, and together, these views quietly celebrate that the world is not one overlookable thing but, wonderfully and without limit, this and this and this.