ARTISTS TALKING

In these alternative spaces the figures often appear fragmented or insubstantial – hit by light, melted into air or bombarded by snow. By transforming them in this way I want to suggest an ambivalence about their experience that could be one of painful obliteration or one of physical or spiritual ecstasy. Increasingly I have also tried to suggest such extremes of pain or pleasure by using thin, watery mixtures of acrylic paint which are allowed to flood across images in translucent veils, bursting boundaries and uniting shapes to suggest overwhelming emotions or sensations.

My current show at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull is based on work by the seventeenth century metaphysical poet and Hull MP, Andrew Marvell. Avoiding human relationships, the speaker of these poems wants to be "embraced" by branches, "embroidered" by leaves and fused with the non-human. He wishes to lose himself in a state of bliss and innocence among woods and gardens, a state he refers to as "paradise alone". Rather than simply becoming immersed in this green idyll, however, he remains burdened by a sense of conflict, destructiveness, mutability and mortality. My paintings once again focus on the image of the voluntary outsider who is now set in a 'liquid', shifting landscape that seems both beautiful and sinister. The figure appears either in the process of being destroyed or ecstatically released through the use of my flooding, curdling, watery paint and through the light that emanates from within the body and from the surrounding landscape.

Since completing this series I have returned to the image of the rider but removed the Wild West associations of my earlier paintings. The man and horse, illuminated in gold and purples and without the cowboy narrative, seem almost iconic. However, my painting style is once again deliberately iconoclastic as bursts of light or fluid paint shatter the image in the direction of trauma or ecstasy.

UPDATE 2006
After showing at Ferens, ‘Paradise Alone’ toured to St Edmund Hall, Oxford and Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer, London. The flawed paradise idea was the basis for my next solo show, ‘Immense Dawn’ (2003), in which monkeys are depicted as part of wild and mutating bursts of vegetation. One of these, Flamboyant Jungle was selected for John Moores 23. My current series of works, ‘Leisure Paintings’, showing with Paul Stolper, is a return to representing the human but still concerned with the landscape of “pleasure”. These large paintings (some of which have been shown at the RCA, the RA and Vosges und Partner, Frankfurt) depict masses of figures on beaches and at banquets. Overwhelmed by the crowd as well as by overarching darkness, the figures are depicted in process of transformation. I have continued to develop a language of poured, pitted, layered marks through which to represent the figure as a vulnerable creature, ultimately vulnerable to the painting process in which it becomes part of a pattern of abstract marks or shapes.