Due Respect to “Surface”
This is what my Artist Statement will discuss.
I am a painter and have noticed that those elements that endure throughout the act of painting need not necessarily include Brush, Paint, or Canvas. Although within my ‘painting’, they are always featured.
As we get more and more used to commercial media imagery how does one make Art that bewilders aesthetically when the commercial sector are getting most proficient, not only in their well established mimicry of Art and Film, but can actually surpass our endeavours with the help of their growing experience and huge budgets, that back each and every image? Drenching our vision 24 hours a day. Combine this with the speed of a mobile text, remote control with 300 channels or broadband internet. This work does not condemn the world today but certainly gives a solid altenative.
I feel Artists try sometimes to compete with ‘The Commercial industries’.
I wanted to compete on a wider scale, with the Renaissance painters, or the Abstract Expressionists, or the 50s Conceptualists, by using Respect: to the surface and to the image and to the history of art, with imagery that is nearly pointless to mimic and near impossible to reproduce because the image is based on a happening and obsessive painstaking activity, and exhaustive research and energy in the execution of the work, and those who understand it will feel that this conceptual, Art Povera-Painting. It will bore, excite, inspire, anger or pass by silently but, I think that the work is quite rare in a contemporary scene.
My 2 dimensional persuasion has informed and coerced every element of my creativity henceforth.
I have painted, made installations, made 2 feature films, initiated and organised site specific happenings (as seen on CV) but all works are concerned with or based on an ‘image’ and/or the ‘surface’.
· If I can clean a stripe to divide an old office in two (Vane 98 Group show), the issue of taking away a layer of grime or dirt is as strong as adding a titanium white to a painting. If not a stronger gesture.
· Adding a tiny line to every tooth of weave of a canvas, microscopically and meditatively scans over a canvas until every square millimetre is covered.
· Hand-writing fragments of philosophy until 100,000 words have been read, understood and transcribed onto paper, end to end, leaving very little space until 81 pages can be assembled into a huge page of tiny writing, deals again with surface. (Jacques Derrida has personally sent hand written permission allowing me to use 6 of his conclusions within the piece.)
My film debut ‘The Veranda’ which was awarded Best Foreign Feature at the Los Angeles IIFF, was shot with a very static painters cinematography, while including certain ‘Real Site Specific Art’ within it’s fiction. (See also CV)

Works in Progress or Future Projects

• ‘The Page’
  I have been/will be reading, with no purpose other than to listen to: Hegel, Kant,
  Heideigger, Murdoch, Derrida, Sontag and others. I shall take fragments of this work and copy the words, by hand, onto square graphed paper. The writing goes from one side of the page to the other and leaves very little space either end. (See sample photo copy) On one page of A4 paper I get 3 to 4 book pages written and so the piece being 9 x 9 A4 pages will have 240-320 book pages within it. (Around 100,000 words in total). If you photo copy the page 81 times and places the pages 9 by 9 in size you will get an indication of the work.
  Duration of creating Work 2years in total… Price £12000
• 5 Dot Paintings
  These are square canvases of approx. 22cm x 22cm in size, with quite a thick weave.
  Each tooth of weave has a tiny line drawn or painted on it until the whole canvas is full of tiny lines or ‘dots’. Until observed closely, one might think that nothing has been done, but on closer inspection one notices the dots and maybe wonders about process, patience and surface. Fundamental elements of painting and its history.
  Duration of painting each piece 3months… Price: £3000
• Light Photography
  This work is involved in processing and reprossessing the photograph. Print outs, and retaking of imagery to create incredibly sumptuous and sinister imagey. They use only light, prints, water and a camera. No adobe, creating something I hope to be quite special. The images are then condensed into miniatures so losing no impact of colour and gaining from an observer's forced scrutiny, but some will be printed on metal on a large scale and so the atmosphere of the works will be given due respect. Andso a lady looking out of a window will be three quarters the size of the real world. The new scale, with its sombre tone and intense colour, its fragmentation of the interior gathered in the cool cube of a gallery will create the dialectic of white crisp space against/with the condensation of colour, the human subject and exagerated subjectivity.
  

• Architectural Gestures
  This will be a series of 3 to 5 short videos to be projected with score specifically
  composed for the work with in a darkened setting. The gestures are: a window, a hall, a door, a floor, a wall, which will be shot with filmic poetics and rhetoric, without conscious narration. An ambition is to discuss the ‘power of the architect’.
  Duration to make film 3 months… Price £2000
• Initial Images
  These images I am being a little secretive about but they will mainly be video and painted images concerning memory and integral moments of creativity

Previous series of Painting

• Animal Silhouettes were taken from 1960s wildlife magazines and painted with discarded hardware store domestic paints and charity shop table cloths as canvas to render strong clean imagery.
  Size of paintings 150cms x 120cms or 120cms x 90cms… Prices vary: £800 to £1800