Notes on past practice

Self portrait - 1996

The thread of picture-making practice that I am going to lay out before you has its roots in my first engagement with art at the age of thirteen. For the sake of brevity, clarity and unbroken narrative, however, I will begin with the work I produced upon what could be called the outset of my adult career.

Being an autodidact, or “self-taught” (fundamentally oxymoronic expressions that are, sadly, difficult to elide), my practice has never been fraught with too many questions on what to produce, whether to produce, or why produce at all. I have just produced, inspired by what has stimulated and stuck with me and by a vague conviction that even the solipsistic and hermetic tendencies of spontaneous picture-making can, perhaps, challenge solipsism on its own ground – that the opacity and incomrehensibility of the putative individual is, in fact, a superstition and that, whatever else it might be, as a basic form of transmission, image making cannot help but communicate.

Triptych - 1997

                                                                      

My first paintings were in oils – a medium I felt it necessary to familiarise myself with and, if not dominate, at least make some inroads into its possibilities. The compositions were pre-draughted but my lack of technique in the application of the paint made for a certain incalculability as far as the finished image would appear. The famously protean nature of this medium is a lesson in being alive to the spontaneous life of paint itself and reinforced my existing tendency to privilege the more graphic elements in my work: line and delineated form. Faces, heads and hands were sources of fascination to me from the outset. Taken as discrete formal elements in themselves, their inter-arrangement allows for a rich field of spatially and dynamically suggestive relationships within a composition.My work in oils became freer and no longer dependent on underdrawn schema. Gradually, I tended to produce smaller works on paper and to leave the time-consuming medium of oil paint behind.

Untitled - 1997

Standing figure - 1997

More spontaneity in mark-making was my goal and in this I was particularly inspired by certain strands in the calligraphic traditions of Japan and China, where maximal effect is derived from minimal marks (the aesthetics of efficiency). The glory of this ostensibly reductive and compressing approach was its evocative amplitude. This, albeit I was grounded in the analytic current of european figuration, provided me with a cue to explore the decriptive, allusive and ambiguous properties of basic mark-making – an approach I took into life-drawing.

Life drawing - 1998

Life drawing - 1997

Somewhat obsessed with the fertile potentials of lines operating as describers, hinters, ambiguities and obstructions, my work took the form of line drawings. Here the figurative subject is evoked with minimal marking but the marks themselves are put into complex relation with each other and the form they suggest by being of different colours and thicknesses. The main subtance of the figure itself is the blank page and the lines serve to evoke this presence in absence.

Head study - 1998

Half-figure - 1998

The subsequent development was to elaborate and colour-in the plains defined by the lines. Here the plains themselves could bring with them another layer of suggestiveness and evocation through their interplay with the lines that divided them and the varying forms and colours of their fellow plain shapes.

Head series #17 - 1999

 This filling-in itself suggested the next phase, which was that of the silhouette. The background now changed from predominantly black to white and the new medium was ink rather than coloured pencil. These Accretions, as I have come to call them (for ease of cataloguing – the name could well apply to  other works), brought with them a working outwards, an expansive process of gradual accretion of ink towards the final image, whereas before the work had been one of delimiting space and then working within those limits.

Accretion (The box) - 2001

With this work, like tree rings, every phase of the drawing is preserved in the final state. The finishedimages became comments on their own evolution – and they kept and exposed the record of their making.

Large accretion (Containment) - 2001

Following on from the silhouettes, worked-out in ink, I turned to the relation of the silhouete line to itself: i.e. its implicit ambiguity, particularly when rendered with only two colours. Which is the defining line? Is there a defining line when it is the product of blocks of colour? These pictures were predominantly produced with acrylic paint. The process was still one of building up the image by acting on the suggestiveness of pre-existing marks and colours but the efficiency of the paint in covering up previous states left an archaeological hint of previous work in each finished painting, rather than the explicit record produced by the ink drawings.

Orpheus - 2002

At this point my work turned to a synthetic mode and each previous stage that had focused on a technical differentiation – i.e. open lines, closed lines, silhouette blocks and surface accretion – became part of a practical repertoire, wherein they could be combined.                                           

Now some words on intentionality.

With the exception of some early oil paintings and, infact, precisely due to frustrations and impasses relating to working out compositions in that medium, early on my work came to rest on there being no idea of the final state of the image at its outset. Progress, without an over-arching concept, was through step-by-step mark-making and the assimilation and suggestivesness of these marks – be they recognisably figurative forms ( e.g., a face, an eye, a nose, a profile) or variations on a line. I would liken it to walking in total darkness, without a visible or imaginable destination, each uncertain step an end in itself. The first mark could always be the last – there is no commitment to any degree of finish or complexity. The progression of the work depends on the suggestive power of the existing marks – whether or not to continue and, if so, how to continue are questions answered facing the physical facts available (e.g. seeing in an originally figuratively uncommitted line the possibility of a bridge of a nose, a cheek or a forearm). This response to the suggestiveness of a certain mark is always mediated and informed by the picture plane – or, put bluntly, the space available in which to imagine.

Annunciation - 2008

Angel - 2005

The final state of any picture is radically contingent. It is enough to know that it will reach a final state for it to reach it. It's particularity is unforeseeable while its ontological status – avant la lettre - is never in doubt (it will be, but I cannot know what it will be until it is).

What attends the recognition of completion is some tension between the formal (colour, compositional) elements and the representational or figurative “content” - more often than not this tension is a result of a radical ambiguity brought out by material and symbolic juxtapositions and contrasts.

This is perhaps the time to discuss the symbolic content of my work. The human figure is both form and symbol. Analyses of the human form return one with eyes refreshed to natural form. This is the realist foundation of the western tradition, expressed, among others in the Modern tradiotion through Cezanne, Matisse, Giacometti, Freud and Hockney. There is also in Modernism the path of inducing/expressing bewilderment as notably chanelled through the scuola metafisica, Dada, Surrealism and much Art Brut – these themselves springing from Symbolism and, as with the Realist school, having roots in the Renaissance (wherein Humanism flourished by accounting for both the formal/rational apprehension of the human figure and engaging the rich, syncretic psychic field of ancient and christian symbology).

And not yet nowhere - 2009

As crude as this perfunctory mapping is, these two strands are what I have always considered to be the ground of my practice - the unavoidable concerns or a priori within the western tradition. This is not to privilege one cultural tradition above others but just to state the one in which I found myself.

That the figure itself is a symbol is a fact that has remained largely unconscious throughout history.

Almost immediately, the figure is subsumed into its pictorial or cultural environment; inscribed into a determining mythos and thereby unreflectingly sublimated into a given. However, this elides the necessary inseperability of image/representation and symbolic function. Taken as a litteral stand-in for its real model, we could see a figurative image as a tool, an aide memoir, for contemplation of the real, physical condition of the human animal but, I hope it has been noticed, to regard an image in this way – as utilitarian – obliges an invocation of abstaction as liable to suspicion as the symbol itself – i.e. the semiotic reduction only works in partnership with speculative expansion.  

Le bordel ou Un bel après-midi - 2009

The symbol as mystical/superstitious object is a concept derived from such speculations, themselves divorced from the relationality which is the symbolic function – to posit its mystification is only to further mystify it. What the symbol is, as exampled by a human figure, is a recognition of the gap between the signifier and the signified but in the dialectical rather than the nominalist sense. To have present to one's senses an image of a human animal is to be inside the unavoidable questions of what it is to be and how to know it.

Having stressed the figure as symbol par excellence, I can now say a little about other symbolic elements in my work. In brief, I consider all signs and symbols available for use: essentially as marks themselves, albeit composite ones. Whether symbols are drawn from religion, alchemy, mathematics, cartoons or grafitti, their deployment is not dogmatic or didactic – there are no cryptic messages to be painstakingly unravelled by brilliant obsessives. There are, of course, interpretative possibilities but each interpreter must take their share of responsibility for his or her choices in this matter.

Interior - 2012

Fundamentally, what I want to convey is opacity. I lament the absence of opacity and so set about producing it. In this sense I am an unashamedly superficial artist. The surface is what I see and the surface is where I stay. I have no time for depth. Depth is superabundant and painfully irrelevant. What is depth now if not an all too easily imagined transparency; a network of formal relations extending through space and time, from geometries to cause and effect, in which we are but a sequence of code in a great cosmic dance that tumbles through the crystalline logic of its own determinations into infinite variation? If we are limited in our descriptive powers we can console ourselves in the belief that someone else knows the mind of God; knows where we come from and where we are going; has cognised the map.

This is all well and good and, even, mildly tranquilising but, in my experience, has little to do with being in the world. If mathematics is pure reason then art is a distinctly impure reason: it takes the contradictions, ambiguities, opacities of experience and posits them as valid data in themselves. The psychological and physical mess of life, unabstracted, unrefined, unpurified. This is realism.