My work consists of two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable strands. On one hand, there is a monochromatic realism that dwells on the instruments of mechanical making ; on the other, a colourful and fragmented near abstraction. These are the modes of painting that I am intuitively drawn to, and it has puzzled me why my habitual methods are so seemingly unrelated.
It came to me recently that what is common to these two approaches, is a concern with the image, to be more specific, the paralysis of my ability to make art in the face of a world becoming critically over-filled with artefacts.
In terms of the visual, this filling began 64,000 years ago, when the painters of the Maltraviesco cave first stencilled their hand prints on rock (these were probably Neanderthals). It continued with more elaborate cave paintings in the pre- civilisational era and as civilisation evolved images amassed at a steady trickle. At first this was largely in religious contexts, then the aspiration of image-making changed in the Renaissance, but this was still confined to the houses of the rich and powerful. The whole process accelerated massively however with the onset of photography and the advertising industry in the early twentieth century, from which time communal space became more and more occupied with visual imagery. For some there is now a sense in which the world is full, and the artist constantly struggling to make something new to overcome the feeling that more imagery is not needed.
Besides this, there are different ways in which the image has become problematic from the beginning of the twentieth century , difficulties that underlie a growing distrust not only of the pictorial, but of its counterpart in other arts, for instance of narrative in literature and melody in music. Firstly there is post-modernism, with its skepticism and irony, and mistrust of grand narratives . Along side this is the development of psycho-analysis through the work of Freud, Klein, Jung and others, in which the unconscious undermines the subjective self. In the visual arts, the work of Picasso and Braque began the unravelling of Renaissance visual perspective and conceptual simplicity, and this has continued since. In physics the unpicking of our experience of reality began with Einstein and relativity, undermining the simplicity of dimensions, showing space and time are continuous, and energy and mass interchangeable. The first subatomic particle was discovered towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the study of the very small continued through the work of `Bohr in the twenties into the origins of quantum mechanics. This included the possibility that so-called reality is crystallised from a mass of possibility by the act of observation (to collapse the super-position or quantum wave function). In all fields the world of common sense, common reality, has been revealed to be illusory.
All these factors erode the conceptual underpinnings of subjective truth . For some however there is a further dimension of uncertainly about the image, that stems from a realisation of the way that humans have affected the world, mass extinctions, global warming, depletion of resources and the like, and which results in a radical distrust of that which is human.
Yet despite all this I accept my work as an artist to be an essential human vocation, with all that goes with that, and as well as paralysis, I have found in the tension at the heart of painting - the dialectic of form and abstraction - the possibility of a way forwards.
The method I began to evolve many years ago to set off from ground zero, was the free association of small pictorial elements without any end-point in mind, working under the guidance of a few basic principles - to look for an increase in complexity, and to think in terms of certain underlying forms, like machinery, the body and language. The end result could be seen as a snapshot of the collapse of Bohr’s superposition, and what I am watching is the emergence of form from the multiplicity it contains. It is not an image, in any straightforward sense. Importantly in a world reified by positivism, these ideas have a correspondence with the discourse of mystics, for whom little can be said about the reality they have experienced . This is also an important way in which the image fails. If the painting is successful, there remains in it a sense of the moment when abstraction becomes form, and the tension in that process.
In creative terms there is a similar process in jazz, where the melody is first stated, and the instruments then work to erode and subvert it. Revelation comes when it is broken open, remaining as fragments against a cloud of harmonics . My paintings operate in a similar way, propose a similar relationship to image, but in reverse order ; the cloud comes first, any melody is an emergent property.
My monochromatic work however, is not describable by any of these processes ; but it does involve the same paralysis as the inevitable starting point. The interior intention, the formulation of the image, as the foundation for art, is similarly distrusted, but whereas the previous solution was the spontaneity of free association, here it is sought in absorption in the external subject.
Some days during the meticulous drawing involved I can hardly drag the brush across the canvas, barely put one foot in front of the other, I am trudging, burdened with a tangle of existential doubt , I am Sisyphus, not daring to imagine it is possible to produce a meaningful painting, but compelled to try, and to repeat the attempt on a daily basis. When the work is finished, the scene it portrays is silent, as if abandoned, though retaining the traces where humans have been - the post-its on the wall, the way a rope has been knotted. The finished painting is an unpopulated, post-industrial theatrical set, an empty scene which is not so much waiting for the drama, as remembering it - a drama whose characters might be the striking textile workers of Mumbai, the original Luddites of the old North, or indeed the hopeful inheritors of Ruskin, but in all cases characters whose story is bound up in the struggle of making. Beyond this, the final image reflects the intensity of emptiness, an intensity focused through the monochromatic gaze, as if seen through a microscope; the burning point of attention, the sheer effort that went into recording detail, together with its futility. Here, at the end of making, when the creation is finished, when the battle of manufacture stops, there is the possibility of desolation - yet this is also where the painter takes the leap of faith, of hope, because he has painted.
Hand stencils in Perito Moreno Cave, Argentina (13,000 -9000 BP). (Photograph by Mariano )