about
The central motivation of my work is drawing. I engage in the process of drawing as a mechanism to render the act of seeing. I am interested in drawing as a tool for looking. I use it to build up a disciplined awareness. The eye feels its way over and around the shapes and space. I use an economical line to describe approaching shapes and forms and illustrate my visual encounters via drawing. I want to use my drawings as a way to experience being amongst things- wanting to touch things, to experience their material presence while simultaneously, necessarily remaining distant from them. I do this in order to describe their spatial configuration within other things and objects.
The built environment provides an overwhelming presence of negative space, which clearly defines everything around, in front of and behind any given object. Nothing is seen in its entirety. It is this constantly changing relationship that keeps me engaged with drawing buildings. Their architectural value is not vital to me but rather merely as a means by which I can use facets and planes of the structure to explore my perception of edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadows.
As a line represents everything, it is not until I begin to paint that this line is translated back into an edge. At this later stage the edge depicts an entirely different space to that from which it was taken.
I make my drawings into paintings in order, to describe the physicality of space with planes of colour. I’m intrigued by the interaction between physical states of place in which we find ourselves and our relationship to these things – in translating these things back. I want to translate the drawings into paint to give the shape a solid form. I use painting to translate the lines of my drawings into forms.
Oil paint allows me to physically push two-dimensional shapes around on canvas. I can repaint and adjust the surface indefinitely to describe shape and form. Oil paint allows me to paint spaces with soft edges without necessitating hard-edged geometric shapes. I can allow space for poetry in the work.
I am developing a considered study around basic components of looking, layered space and fundamental drawing concerns. I want the paintings to be understated. I want them to speak to us of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the monument and the object. Through redrawing, making and painting I engage with the act of remembering and in doing so, try to grasp at my perception of the world around me.