Something of the experience of painting touches the offline reality I pursue; a shared mode fixing painting and thought that instils meaning in the work, meaning in the act of painting and what it is to be a painter. It’s in this instilling of being that a painting is activated, is charged with the capacity to look back, to repel, resist and respond. Painting is a language shared; spoken with oneself, other painters and paintings.

 

As an act it endures both risk and suspicion; a surface may respond transiently with sentiment yet there comes a point of resistance and it is exactly here that the painting begins. I appreciate the substance of paint and seek ways in which to afford the materiality of a work more importance than its subject, so one sees the painting first and image second. Intuitive mark making pins down an image quickly, capturing it at its most alive. 

 

I’m interested in a reduction afforded in the translation of the photographic image and achieving linguistic shorthand in the painterly harnessing of source that elicits a new kind of experience; a slower reading denied by the screen. The paintings deal in the projection of mental imagery, state; how collapsed distinctions between the real and fictitious - absent and present afford new psychological loading to tropes of the figurative tradition.

 

The paintings operate at a certain sound that’s tied up with the speed of mark, tonal resonance and state afforded by both a limited palette and thinness of paint. Interest in the cinematic herein and an emphasis on temperature, vibration and light feeds back to the timbre of a work. I’m intrigued by spaces one can describe yet not recognise, painterly spaces propounding their own logic, then finding a succinct painterly vocabulary congruent to the dialogue between both mechanical and gestural painting in which to render them.