Works on Paper & Canvas
I have made over 3000 water colours, gouaches and paintings on paper over the past 20 years. The works featured on this site are derived from my intensive study of ice age art and my visits to see the cave art in South Western France. I work fluidly with the paint and the forms evolve rapidly defining and redefining themselves as time passes. Paintings are seldom worked on more than once as they lose their potency for me if I have to return to the image.
Carbon Copy Drawings
Ball point pen on carbon copy paper
My father gave me a 1950’s carbon copy book with yellowed pages and a loose, battered sheet of blue carbon paper. I did not know what to do with the book for a long time and just doodled in it until in 1999 when I started drawing figures in parks or urban environments jostling one another and moving erratically about in all different directions. With a similarity to prehistoric cave art these drawings are often superimposed due to the fact that the carbon paper slipped and moved about creating a curious tension in this process of drawing and duplicates. I was also enlivened by the soft blue blur of the lines and their ghostly punctuations of my hand movements. The distortions and caricatures of this period were typical of my work and have since evolved or morphed into another visual dynamic that borders somewhere on the hinterland of biomorphic abstraction. I see these drawings as a prototype for a book and they are sequential.
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Crayon/Chalk Drawings and Drawings on Found Materials
Made on faded 1930’s sugar paper given to me by an artist friend. I like to use materials that find me rather than purchase ready made surfaces and equipment. I was attracted to a huge stack of faded papers in a friend’s closet and asked if I might use some to do some drawings of heads and masks. I made this series of drawings from memory of having worn many masks in my performances and afterwards slowly watching the masks dissolve or decompose with mould. The figures in the drawings relate to fetishes or power images and are derived from my fascination with non western art. I am constantly picking up tickets, receipts and scraps of paper from the streets of cities which to me are enormous urban collages waiting to happen, awaiting creative impetus ignited by the artist’s imagination. My pockets are crammed with such papers and crumpled wrappings. I am interested in using them to momentarily capture an impression and often employ them whilst riding on the bus or the subway to and from somewhere. I do not consider them to be permanent art objects but I like the spontaneity and versatility of recycling garbage paper. I use felt tips, ballpoint pens, pencils and anything that happens to be to hand. I am unconcerned with making a finished, polished image as everything is in a state of flux for me. It’s about flowing into and with the fluxions. These drawings or doodles are unconsciously made (rather like the drawings in my performances) and I have little or no control over them but like the fact that they do not fit comfortably into the bourgeois elitist culture that occasionally nurtures but more often eschews and annihilates artists. I cannot imagine these works as being anything other than utterances from the untapped reservoir of the moment.
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Miniature Drawings
These are made on tiny pieces of Khadi paper and fit perfectly into a wallet or coat pocket. I make hundreds every week and will sit for an hour or so each day and just let the pen reel off as many as will emerge from the reservoir of the mind. Many are idiosyncratic forerunners for paintings that I will develop at a later stage. I never copy or duplicate these designs because this to me destroys the uniqueness of mark making which in turn breeds wonderful forms and compositions. I will attempt to fill an entire book with drawings in one session to release images from the cerebral colander that is my brain.
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Water Colours
Water colour is a magical medium for me. Its so alive and sensitive to my inner vibrations. I have employed it for 25 years as my favourite vehicle for painting. These images emerged after a recent trip to the Dordogne in South Western France, where I visited several caves containing ice age rock paintings. I had only seen such images previously in books and going into these caves was a great adventure and something of an epiphany for me too. I read and studied every book I could get on the subject in an attempt to prime myself for the momentous experience of being face to face with mankind's earliest art works.
I have tried to convey something of the anthropomorphic strangeness and the fragility of these images in the following paintings which were made in situ, at a house nearby the caves. Having been exposed to such incredible and potent images I want to go back into the caves and allow my mind to inhabit the Palaeolithic mind set once again. This is not so much about painting for me, its akin to a shamanic journey into the underworld.
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