Researcher Summary
In my view painting now operates within an expanded field of pluralist activity. An activity, outside stylistic progression, into which any number of ideas, mediums, moods, explorations or traditions can enter, remain or exit. The painting’s planar surface acting as a record of anything from grand schemes to diary-like entries. My recent research considers aspects of abstraction and how it can operate as a Rorschach or gestalt. The paintings find their source in a blend of: personal experience and memory; photographs, literary allusions, text, cinema, existing painting histories and cultural histories in combination with, an open-ended exploration of process and materials. Through colour, form and applied processes the figurative or literal may be reduced, compressed, extended or suppressed to impart a mix of migrating forms and collapsed histories. Overall, the work embraces shifting points of departure, methodologies, styles and modes of expression guided by personal reflexivity. Given its long and complex history major changes or radical shifts within painting today are limited and subtle. As Picasso once noted “No artist ever invented a new shape”. Innovation is largely reliant on the individual quirks of the practitioner. With this in mind my research seeks to evoke an associative and empathetic response in the viewer while referencing a wider cultural context.
