Recent Art 2013 Detail Oil on Canvas Glory Daze 100 x 75 cm .

Artist’s Statement 

Roland Barthes discusses the concept of ‘Punctum’ in his book ‘Camera Lucida’, in which he also examines the themes of presence and absence, history and death.  He speaks about the ability of old photos to wound us. This became one starting point for recent work. 

Recent paintings have also evolved from quest to resolve issues in and around the conversation between painting and photography. Some time ago it became clear that much contemporary painting seemed to work on the level of image; My own included. Images, which could quite easily not even need the medium of paint, are distributed via the net as flattened pictures. They work on the same level as the millions of other images, which flood our global community. But they are flat and only question the world in much the same way as posters. Great skill and imagination goes into the making of such images- combining appropriated images from the past with delightful absurd tweaks, the illustration of dystopias and re-workings of old masters- yet they do not question what it is to be a ‘painting’, or to have been a photo. 

I began this body of work on the premise that, “If painting is to be art - Art should ask questions, not simply through signifiers, adverts do that, but through medium”. Great masters at one time, after the birth of photography sought to create new languages. Picasso and Cezanne were some of the leading protagonists, all part of the modernist quest. But then it seemed there was no more to discover, in fact the proclamation that painting was dead echoed through the galleries as paintings crawled off the walls and canvases wept for better days. Postmodern painting seems more interested in content in paintings. I felt it needed to do more. I wanted to find a language which reduced mark making to a form which was almost completely stripped of artistry, mimesis. Which celebrated paint and arrogated/usurped  photography. I set out to be ‘anti’ the degree zero banal style, and to be the antonym of subdued tasteful tones. To play with modernist abstraction and set them to play in fresher as yet unexplored arenas. I set out to celebrate colour and surface and tried to let content take slightly less of a lead in my work.

Like many painters, struggling to make painting ‘Art’ in the epoch of postmodernism, photographs became a starting point for a structure – old photographs innately carry an element of collective memory, voyeurism and inherent is a sense of nostalgia, memory and Punctum. Looking back is very symptomatic of a deep unease in looking forward. In translating faded, black and white - photos, (objects) usually no more than 5 -10cm, the painting process used tries to deconstruct the surface and the meanings, to cannibalize image –explore photography’s ‘noeme’- its ‘intersum’; The narrative is obliterated, image fractured by blots of paint which seek to find respite somewhere in a new landscape of colour. The colour is employed in deliberate polemic- a theorized reaction to modernist concerns- (and so I stand as Other).