M.A 2012 - 2013
When I am painting, one of the most exciting moments that I am privileged to experience is what I would call the ‘reveal’.
My painting process involves applying layers of different types of media onto canvas and this may include; oil paint, emulsion paint, gloss paint-in fact almost anything that has the potential to create a kind of appearance and texture that I am looking for to recreate the surface of various elements of the urban landscape.
As the paintings are linked to images of decay such as peeling paint and rotting walls which are made up of different gradients, some of which are visible through other layers and some lurk almost hidden underneath.
When I peel back and scrape the layers to reveal the areas that are buried, this I find, to be the most satisfying and exciting moments of creating a painting. I can mentally visualise what may occur but the reality has many possibilities and differing outcomes which can be both frustrating and sheer bliss.
If I do not see the effect I am aiming for I am then presented with a challenge and this results with even further experimentation and investigation and if I achieve what I am aiming for, I have the bonus of trying to memorise these events so I can incorporate them into other work but ironically, the same method may not guarantee the same result. No outcome seems to be secure.
This is something I want to share with an audience. It is the activity and the feeling of the unexpected; I want others to experience not the finished artwork but the element of surprise that happens when ‘artworks’ are being created. The sheer manual labour of making, because the enjoyment of creating an artwork has a different value to the satisfaction of the finished image so for me it is all about the ‘event,’ the moment and how it influences and can dominate. It is possibly visible and can be experienced for only a second and then it is over, gone forever.
The images in this book are an attempt to recreate and to portray the feeling of the momentary joy and how that feeling exists because it is fleeting. It is almost so intimate that it is almost impossible to share. The displaying of the finished painting is one way but perhaps this can only be described as a document of a finished work but hopefully the photographs can instigate the individual surprise that I can feel which is centred in the unrepeatable action and the event.
The moment of the reveal is a one off and once the action of scrapping and stripping away of the layers can be described as the language of the ‘reveal’ and the risks of once started then this leads to a committed action and result which bonds the relationship between artist and artwork because this for me is the language of the raw and dangerous where the intimacy between roles of the ‘maker’ and the ‘made’ is revealed.
