When my poodle was a puppy I woke up to find she'd chewed her way through an intensely serious Deleuzian theory book titled The Trouble With Pleasure. She was teething.
The paintings in this show began in March 2024, after a long pause while I moved from London to rural Suffolk. Here I spend mornings walking out in the wildest places I can find and swimming in the sea, and then the rest of the day painting. This very physical immersion in (or battering by) Nature prepares me for the long, introverted painting sessions.
I find difficulty and eventually pleasure in the building up of a group of paintings without a plan, without a map. The dreamish lostness can become anything- enchanted even-or suddenly fall back into a horrible dissolution of meaning. In this way it's a sort of alchemical game.
The images I've projected into the abstract compositions are very basic: stock silhouettes, line drawings from colouring-in books. But the abstraction comes first, arising from a long drawn-out negotiation between binaries: structure and flow, hard and soft, crude and subtle, dirty and clean, rough and tender, and so forth.
There are recurring horizontal bands that divide the canvases into areas of different activity, because I want paint like this and like that. Greedy. But they often read as levels of consciousness, which would make sense, for example in 'Come As You Are', where the newly hatched turtles swim up from the base of the canvas.
I've also called in a lot of Venus energy at my studio altar, so Botticelli's rendering of the Goddess Flora, which I've borrowed many times, comes this time with her face glazed in Venus green. In this painting, titled 'Greener', a poodle stares after a wild wolfy dog.
The Flowers of Life geometry, often scored into the wet oil paint with a compass, continues to show itself as the undernetting, a shorthand for the connectedness of everything (even a collage mentality), producing cubes or eyes or heads, etc., and the compass point pierces through the canvas in an asymmetric grid, sometimes sewn through. I almost called the show 'Do we really understand the undernetting?', from Nico. Anyway, it's where the synchronicities come from.
In the end each painting has to somehow harmonise its elements so it doesn't need me any more.
