It’s been two and a half years I think between the two shows, so I think there have been quite practical changes to how I paint, I now work on coloured grounds instead of blank white, and I use printing techniques in the paintings now. I think it’s naturally evolving, but the fundamental ideas in the work have stayed the same.
Ah not at all. When I have a show coming up, I tend to work on multiple paintings at once, to build them up together so that hopefully there’s a clear link running through the work. It’s important to me that the works feel like they’re ongoing, or overlapping with each other. In the show, I took that a little further by actually painting paintings that are in the show back onto other paintings in the show. The whole thing began to envelop itself.
My routine is very consistent, I arrive at 10 and leave by 6 every day, I eat the same thing from the same cafe every day, but I suppose that’s not really a ritual, it’s just a preference. The only thing that really changes each day is my mood.
To tell you the truth, it hasn’t affected me like it has done to so many others, not physically by catching it or mentally by being in isolation. I’m still in my studio, as it’s just me by myself, and I suppose my work is not really influenced by outside forces. At the very start of the first lockdown I found it difficult to paint, it seemed a bit inappropriate to not adjust or recognise what’s happening in some way. So I stayed in and made drawings for a month.
I kind of regret saying that. I do have an idea, but that idea always changes whilst I’m making the painting. I don’t start from nothing, I shift from one thing into another.
I don’t really think about it, I suppose now you’ve asked it that I would say that I choose colours and colour combinations that aren’t seen together in real life very often, I stay away from ‘realistic’ colour palettes. Maybe I like the idea of them being lifted out of that world, for the paintings to operate in their own space if that makes any sense. I think the colours I choose are there possibly to make the paintings freer.
They’re a mix of colloquial type sayings, things that have a nice meter of rhythm to them. Titling used to annoy me, people often make them too grandiose or ignore them altogether, so I like to operate in between that. A title of mine could read as nonsense small talk or because it’s a title for a painting, feel like it carries a little meaning with it.
I think scenes of people help with the idea of things overlapping and enveloping each other; I don’t want the works to be wholly abstract. I make collages mainly, from all sorts of materials, from photographs I’ve taken recently back to cave-like paintings. I think with painting people are always aware of history and time, so it’s quite nice to be able to make the work shift between different reference points to help with the overall sense of things being fluid and ongoing.
In an exhibition, I’m more aware of it, more aware of how a viewer might walk through a gallery and what works they see in what order and how that might affect things. But not really in individual paintings.
Both, someone once described it as different stanzas of the same poem. Which, whilst being quite a wanky thing to say, does actually make a lot of sense in relation to your question.
I’m not entirely sure yet, I often get an idea and make a leap forward in how I go about making a painting, and then I don’t feel comfortable with the change being so drastic. It’s a little two steps forward, two steps back, a couple sideways etc.
It’ll depend on whether they like them.