ARTIST STATEMENT
My work embodies creation through movement and action. Layered with continual development, the painting evolves alongside me as an artist: a recorded journey of my feelings, experiences, insecurities and ideas.
Painting makes me aware of my body, it’s like a swan plucking at its feathers, it’s the time when I feel like me and I feel my self, without it I have no idea who I am. It is an essential process of catharsis, as I feel any art form is for any artist. It’s the time when my heart rate slows to normal and I feel calm and clear, if I didn’t paint I’m certain I would go insane. From the moment my crayon hit the paper when I was four everything suddenly made sense and I haven’t stopped since. As I’ve developed as an artist I’ve found myself returning to the child in me as I strive to regain that pure, uninhibited, unpretentious expression all children naturally have. When I drew my first drawing I was a genius, now I am just a copycat.
I want to move people with a shock of emotion, to free them for a moment from the confines of their conscious minds by making them aware of their own presence within the painting. There they have a new landscape to explore themselves in. My use of sculpture and thick layers of paint gives a third dimension, which can draw the viewer in and will move with the viewer around the room as the light and shadow shifts with them. To me life is endless, unstoppable movement and I use that in my style of painting. I want to break everything back down to the raw essence of who we are and what we are. My use of crude materials such as sticks and mud and almost childish expression, simplistic lines and bold colours underpin that intention. When I paint I throw my entire body and being into it, it’s a very physical, rough, passionate process and I never know until I step back what the end result will be.
In this body of work I wish to depict the catastrophic effects of human avarice and our desire to breed and spread and consume endlessly while the rest of the world tries to balance out our excesses. I also want to show the hope, the essential good I believe to exist within us and the abundant beauty we are still surrounded by and can work to preserve. Redemption, creation, birth and its struggle, its frantic, frightening, stunning, liberating journey, the same journey we are all on, are all strong themes in my work.
Animals are a great source of inspiration too, as is transportation, migration and movement. Flamingos, for example, shows the devastation caused by human expansion versus the birds’ attempts to co-exist along side us and fly free from our spreading mess. Beauty in the face of aggression, triumph over confusion, elegance and dignity in the face of chaos. Nature and the animal kingdom can teach us so much, tearing away our preconceptions and pretensions to reveal us as essential, magnificent sentient beings who are part of their world, as opposed to ego driven power-maniacs, working against it to achieve transient, delusional glory. This idea of transience is echoed throughout my work, particularly prevalent in Flowerpot, Tsunami and Deckchairs, where the innocent nostalgia of the naïve, consumerist abundance of the 50s is juxtaposed against the resulting ruin decades later.
The purpose of my work is not to dictate my ideas but rather to inspire the viewer to ask those questions that, in turn, have inspired me. I want us to see ourselves with new, innocent yet wise eyes, to see what we are, what we’ve become and what we could be.