Painting 16: Untitled (After Xanadu)

Oil on found object, 59x44cm, Frame size - 66x51cm, 2009

I made this painting as part of a themed exhibition in Studio 106 for the Brighton Festival Fringe.  The studio is on Coleridge Street in the Poets Corner area of Hove.  I think there were about 18 of us working there at the time, and we decided to take 3 lines each from the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and make work inspired by those lines.

These were my lines:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,  
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,  
A mighty fountain momently was forced:

It was really refreshing to be challenged in this way and it was fascinating to see how each of us expressed our lines within the framework of our practice. I found it quite a different process being inspired by a poem to being inspired by a song or piece of music.

Painting 15: Untitled (Pastoral)

Oil on found object, 75x59cm, frame size 83x67.5cm, (frame unglazed) 2009

My painting practice is very focused on the present moment.  When painting 'I could have sworn I felt my spirit soar', I became interested in the history that is attached to paintings that have been discarded.  I was also starting to examine how artists would respond to the changing landscape of the earth, given the forecasts relating to climate change.

Here I have combined these two interests by taking paintings of old landscapes and experimenting with how they would be different, should they have been painted in the future.  So here, all the living creatures have been blocked out in grey so their silhouette shows where they have been but where they could potentially no longer be sustained.

The over-sized deer is the crux of the painting, in that as the only living thing, it is challenging the viewer to inhabit that world (share the encounter) and consider all that is at stake.  

I've never felt led to engage directly with politics through my painting. Instead I have developed a creative process that comes from within and strengthened that with my abstract paintings.  I feel that the paintings I have made based on found objects mark the beginning of trying to externalise that creativity in a more worldly context, without compromising the sense of discernment.

Painting 14: Untitled (There are Eyes Above)

Oil on canvas, 190x150cm, 2009

This painting was inspired by four lines from the song 'There Are Eyes Above' by Josephine Foster:

There are eyes above
There are feet below
I am in between
Somebody console me 

It was quite remarkable how each time I listened to the song, I heard or felt something slightly different which gave me what I needed to progress with the painting.  It was like the music had a life in the way that it spoke to me at various times.  I really feel that paintings can have the same effect in that they constantly offer the viewer a window to something new.

The composition was also drawn from the song, in that I have left the middle of the canvas empty for the viewer to position themselves within the painting.  This is an expression of how I felt while listening to the song: the 'eyes above' felt like a higher awareness and the 'feet below' drew me back to myself.  It really felt like I was seeking to occupy the space in between where there is potential for anything!

This links to the theory of the aesthetic experience where the viewer becomes aware of the limitations of their self-consciousness at the same time as desiring to comprehend the immensity of what they are being presented with.  In the end there's only so much we can know before we submit to just being in the moment.

Painting 13: Untitled (Deer Encounter 2)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

Yesterday I compared the experience of encountering a deer in the wild with the experience that can be felt from looking at a painting.  With this painting I am exploring how that sense of encounter is affected if the deer is observed from a voyeuristic point of view?  How does this affect the viewer's relationship to the painting?

Painting 12: Untitled (Deer Encounter 1)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

The deer seemed to arrive in this painting of its own volition.  My work is primarily concerned with the viewer's encounter with the painting. Discovering a deer in the wild is comparable to this experience due to the heart-stopping sensation where you become aware of each other and time appears to freeze to allow you to be fully present and alive in the moment.

Painting 11: Untitled (Spring)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

As I have brought my exhibition forward to open next Thursday 12th April, I will be uploading my paintings more frequently to make sure you have seen them all by the opening night.

Yesterday's painting (10) was a figurative painting which occupies its own unique space within my practice.

This painting is the first time I allowed what was a purely abstract painting to give rise to a recognisable living being.  It happened completely organically and felt like there was a presence within the painting that needed to be given shape and form. 

Painting 10: I could have sworn I felt my spirit soar

Oil on canvas, 190x150cm, 2008

Here is a piece that I wrote about the background to this painting to accompany an exhibition:

In 1895, William Adolphe Bouguereau painted Le Ravissement De Psyche (this translates as The Abduction or the Raptures of Psyche).  Bouguereau, as a popular salon painter, was emphatically opposed to the emerging Impressionist movement because he interpreted their style as a rejection of the tradition of painting in terms of both technique and content.  This controversial stance put Bouguereau out of favour with his contemporaries and his oeuvre gradually became scorned as the 20^th Century reinvented the entire discourse of fine art. 

While broadly researching the idea of rejected art and what that is, I found a copy of this painting in a charity shop.  When I took it out of the frame it turned out to be a birthday card addressed to Lesley, printed by Athena in 1996.  So the image is now the kitsch material of greetings cards, but was so loved by Lesley that she framed it, then in turn rejected it and gave it to charity.  I was interested in the cyclical story of this painting coming in and out of what is allowed to be called art and what is relegated as being sentimental and displaced.

I wanted to paint this subject in 2008 and investigate the experience of looking at this painting, now out of its time, in the contemporary context where the beautiful is embarrassing and art has to have higher responsibilities.  Would a painting that had been rejected so many times over the last century be rejected again or would there be a way of giving it a contemporary value and engaging with both sides of the debate?

The myth surrounding Psyche and Eros, the two characters in this painting, also involves rejection and the difficult relationship with beauty.  Psyche (meaning soul) was considered to be the most beautiful mortal, so much so that she made the Gods feel threatened and inferior.  Aphrodite instructed her son, Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the most ugly mortal on Earth.  But when Eros saw her he fell in love with her himself.  So Aphrodite made Psyche undertake a series of challenges to become worthy of her beauty and her fate. 

I wanted to paint Psyche and Eros sensitively to try to convey the conviction of their feelings for each other but I wanted to make a clear distinction that this is a painting from 2008 and all the implications of what it means to make this sort of painting in the contemporary artistic climate.  By painting out the background in flat grey, I wanted them to look lost in our time.  I wanted to take the viewer on an uncomfortable journey between responding sensually to the story they tell and feeling repelled by the kitsch value of the rainbow and adornments that I added.

I hope this painting challenges our ideas of whether we still have use for beauty in art.  The aesthetic experience can be drawn upon to contribute to the cultural and critical discourse as well as being the source of ‘pleasure’, a word that today leaves an uncomfortable taste in the mouth.

Painting 9: Light My Sky

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2008


As I was painting this, it felt like everything I was doing was creating the possibility for something to exist within the painting.  Not so much a background, more the conditions for something to be held or contained by the painting.  It wasn't until I added the rainbow that the composition came together and seemed to give me resolution of a sort.  It was another move towards abstraction giving birth to form.

Painting 8: Sing Little Bird

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2008


I think this painting found its title because it feels so free-spirited and to me the bright colours and freedom of the mark-making speak of a flighty energy.  It was a big part of my transition into making more figurative work and you can almost see the structures and forms starting to come through the abstraction.

Painting 7: Beat Glorious Heart

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2008

I really pushed myself with this painting to be as free as I could be and express very directly where the paint was taking me without thinking about it or judging it prematurely.  I had to be brave at the time to follow through with that but it was extremely rewarding in that it opened up the way for me to be more playful and perhaps more honest in my painting process.

Painting 6: Shine Baby Shine

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2008

I consider the next four paintings to form a body of work although they aren't technically a series.  They are much smaller than the paintings you've seen so far (half the size!) and they are beginning to hint at more tangible subjects.

I painted them after moving into Studio 106 and wanted to bring a lightness and freedom to my process in this new context.  It was a big challenge to move on from my weightier canvases and the philosophy underpinning them.  I feel very affectionate towards them!

Painting 5: In Moments

Oil on canvas, 200x160cm, 2007

This was the first painting I made after moving into Studio 106 where I made all of the other paintings that will be part of this auction.

It was a huge shift going from painting in our small living room with plastic sheeting pinned to the wall to sharing a space with 20 really talented people with my unfinished work on permanent display!  I felt massively supported by them personally and creatively.

I wanted this painting to stand alone after finishing The New Sublime series, and it took me five months to complete.  

Painting 4: Behold

Oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2006

The fourth painting of the series entitled The New Sublime

This is what I wrote to accompany the exhibition of the series at the Freise-Greene House Gallery in 2007:

“The New Sublime: Be Found, Believe, Be Held, Behold.

My paintings come from a deep exploration of the aesthetic experience.

In 1790, Kant defined the aesthetic experience as a combination of reactions to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’.  The experience of looking at a painting has the potential to reveal the temporal nature of our being.  It affords the transcendence of the subject from its own boundaries of self-consciousness, liberating it from ideological or subjective intervention.  It supersedes the intellect and the imagination and gives us an indescribable sense of the moment in itself from within the context of the eternal.

‘The New Sublime’ is a meditation on the transitional scope of the contemporary conditions attached to being.  It is an effort to observe and illuminate the sensitive notions of temporality caused by the simultaneous elevation and devastation exhibited in the present climate of what it means to live this moment with this culture and this politic.”

Painting 3: Be Held

Oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2007

The third painting of the series entitled The New Sublime

'Be Found' and 'Believe', the first two paintings in this series, had the energy of something arriving and perhaps breaking through.  I think 'Be Held' felt like a sort of welcome to whatever that was.  It feels softer, brighter and there is a circular dynamic to the painting that seems to want to contain or (as the title suggests) hold the emerging form.

Painting 2: Believe

Oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2006

The second painting of the series entitled The New Sublime

I was massively inspired by Cy Twombly and I think with this painting, I was braving a much more personal interaction with the language I had begun to develop.  The forms had a weight to them and their light and darkness seemed to be more fixed than with Be Found, as though they were modelling things that were going on internally for me at that time.

By focusing on the experience of 'the encounter' with the art work, I started to imagine how it would feel to be in a room with four paintings of this size.  As with Be Found, it was as though this one also represented a transition and opened up the way for the next.

I was drawing from my work with Kant’s theory of the beautiful and the sublime in The Critique of Judgement.  This body of enlightenment theory underpinned my MA dissertation and I will return to those ideas tomorrow.

Painting 1: Be Found

Oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2006
The first painting of the series entitled The New Sublime

This was the first painting that I made on this scale since finishing my Fine Art degree in 2001.  On a study trip to Paris I was moved to tears by a huge Rothko and couldn’t drag myself away from it but had no idea why.  I thought, wow, painting has the power to strike something in us that can make us feel alive in a profound way.  For me it was a total awareness of being present in the moment, like a rush.

Something in this really connected with me, which led me to do my MA to understand more about this experience from the philosophical angle.  After going some way to grasp what I understood by the ‘aesthetic experience’ in my dissertation, I found that my painting process was becoming more devoted to reaching this place than being ‘about’ anything.

I wanted to paint canvases that you could drown in!  Loads of colour, space and movement that all speak to each other.  Be Found was a big leap for me and after 6 months of painting it in my living room and being with it night and day, I felt it was finished and that it had opened out the way for me to follow it with another painting of this size.

Be Found was shortlisted for the Brighton Festival Fringe Visual Arts Prize in 2006 and I exhibited the full series the following year at the Friese-Greene House Gallery.  In 2009, when they were being shown at Xuma, an interior designer offered me a very good price to purchase Be Found for one of her clients.  At the time, I was reluctant to separate the series, so I declined.

I feel now that it is more important that the painting is seen and enjoyed by someone, rather than waiting in storage with the others for a time that may or may not come.