This body of paintings began as an attempt to enter and unravel the margins of some of my other paintings. The margins are areas on the edges of my paintings where I document and collect all the colours which are used throughout the making of the picture.
I started to think about the relief of making these marks in the margin, no drama, just a quick scribble or stroke of what’s on the brush. This feeling of applying paint is the entire opposite of the high concentrated technical painting which is happening in the main image of a painting like ‘There’s a devil at the gates’ for example.
I guess I was looking to try and make paintings that make me happy throughout the process, rather than feeling as if I’m swimming against the tide. Maybe this was a stupid idea, maybe you get stronger swimming against the tide. But there again maybe painting isn’t about getting stronger. I wanted to try and make paintings that would let me sleep at night.
Anyway, these paintings feel as though I’m zooming into different imagined locations within those blobs of paint. Entering a realm where nothing has to make any sense, where I can play games with the application of paint and attempt to capture moments between moments. As if life were a film, I wanted to paint the space between two stills, where everything is about to disappear and then reappear slightly differently.
It’s strange because this last painting ‘Death on a horse’ features the margin again. It’s strange how even when you zoom into the landscape of painting or imagination, things start to repeat again. Like site surveys looking like mycelium networks and roots looking like veins and lungs looking like trees.