ARTISTS TALKING

Painting can evoke a strong emotional response and I happily succumb to its pleasures. Pleasure, however, like painting, is not always easy to describe. Baudelaire thought that the interpretation of art was too important to be left to artists. As an artist I feel it would be easier to agree but the problem of describing one language in terms of another remains.

I currently have four paintings hanging at Dulwich Picture Gallery. They are paintings of white cloth. Monumental in scale, each painting creates an ambiguous space. The human body is absent but implied; it represents itself with the folds and creases created by the cloth. I wanted to convey the pleasures of seeing and touching as well as the less tangible features of fabric such as scent or even sound. When viewed from across a room, these paintings retain a certain unity. However, when viewed close-up at the distance at which they were painted – they are entirely different. Each image becomes fragmented; close up the surface is physical, immediate, worked but the impression is abstract. The selective realities in the work only become visible at a certain range. I wanted to subject each piece of fabric to a meticulous scrutiny, to translate even the smallest details but it was also important to alter and displace what I saw in order to create something which was more than just imitation. Subsequently the paintings contain heavily congested areas next to areas of relatively little action. This, combined with a deliberate spatial compression, creates distinctive movement across the surface of the canvas. So a simple piece of white cloth becomes a metaphor for a body which folds and twists and creases and turns in on itself over and over again creating a vortex, an orifice, a space which is impossible to define.

These paintings disturb me, just as the subtleties of the language of painting disturb me. I'm drawn into the process and the whole impossible cycle begins again.