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Paperweight - a small solid object heavy enough, when placed on top of papers, to keep them from blowing away in a breeze or from moving under the strokes of a painting brush.
These works represent various internal thoughts and feelings toward the environment, produced in the interior space of a studio but not limited by space, except perhaps in scale.
Some are serious and come with baggage, a metaphorical weightiness. They are mimics bound by abstraction and anchored in landscape. The colours at their deepest are meant to evoke a kind of bright murk, swampy miasma, aged relics at once found and abandoned. Mid point is the horizon, still and inflected with greens. Up high is the sky but not as we necessarily expect. Layers and glazes are important and the appearance of heft.
The commitment to abstract Colour Field painting; all over painting defines the background environment, the various folds and structures operate as the foreground allowing the work to inhabit a space between painting and sculpture.
The relative simplicity of the work comes from a desire for clarity; the hidden layers that have been worked on top of, covering and recovering past actions contradicts simplicity and a duality that mirrors how I feel about the world- one rife with hypocracy, contradictions, and cover ups.
I've been making paintings on - and sometimes out of - paper for a while. As a material it can hold so much unexpected weight. It transforms into sculpture quite easily, or can appear flat and undisturbed, and hides it's history quite elegantly. It is, in a way, already a perfect sculpture.
As a vehicle for paint it has its limits, but working within those is gratifying, especially when engaging with its flatness on small scales. More fun than canvas, less faff, and less heavy.
I feel I have a lot of freedom working this way. I try and imbue these small works with a sense of the unfathomable, moments and memories and aches and pains rendered as physically disrupted colour fields. What is the real colour of fog? The haze of air pollution? What would colour field artists (like Mark Rothko) paint if they were still around to witness growing pollution and failing (eco)systems.
Many years ago when I first went to art school I moved quickly from canvas onto much heavier stuff. Sheets of steel, 4 or 5 feet wide, which I occasionally turned into sculptures. My working style has kind of gone full circle but instead of steel I'm on paper. My process has matured and I've been busy collecting various influences.
In spite of this my practice has been shrinking in its physicality; I've started working smaller and I wonder if sketches that once might have been paintings are beginning to find their limits in these smaller formats. I feel the work is about to take a turn, move back out of the non-representational planes I've been comitting myself to and back into something more open-ended.
There is a to- and fro- between wanting to work with material and trying to find a way to repulse it, or remove it completely. I'll go there next. These are beginnings, starts of things, like a swell on sea water that pops into existence, simultaneously appearing and receding away.
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