My painting process is concerned with how actions in painting can be exaggerated or negated by the paint or surface they interact with, how gestural traces move after their application, and how this alters my intent and the way I navigate the formal elements of painting.
I use many different oil and water based paints in combination with polyurethane, PVA and other mediums to make mixtures of varying thicknesses, opacity, viscosity and colour strength. I’m interested in how these mixtures readily interact and self-level when wet, and how they lose these qualities as they begin to dry. Due to this, the degree of alteration of the record of action is determined by choosing when in the drying process to continue painting. Notions of paintings as performance therefore get turned towards a shifting scale and raise the possibility of capturing the time in between the action.
In my practice all aesthetic considerations are intrinsically linked to materials. My neutral spaces are the inherent or enhanced visual properties of the support: the varnished grain of plywood or the reflective sheen of aluminium. I do minimal colour mixing before application, instead I select a small number of colours which get expanded upon by their bleeding together and mixing when the paint is poured.
In terms of line and marks I often work with borders and areas of containment that are both physical and compositional. For example pouring an acrylic border and then using thinner oil paint within that, or having a pool of polyurethane that oil paint will seep into from all sides. I am interested in the surrounding surface becoming a painting in and of itself, using the runoff from one painting to make a border for another. Other times paint runoff is cut out from one surface and collaged onto another with the use of thick tinted glue showing the action of glueing as gestural itself.
I use many different oil and water based paints in combination with polyurethane, PVA and other mediums to make mixtures of varying thicknesses, opacity, viscosity and colour strength. I’m interested in how these mixtures readily interact and self-level when wet, and how they lose these qualities as they begin to dry. Due to this, the degree of alteration of the record of action is determined by choosing when in the drying process to continue painting. Notions of paintings as performance therefore get turned towards a shifting scale and raise the possibility of capturing the time in between the action.
In my practice all aesthetic considerations are intrinsically linked to materials. My neutral spaces are the inherent or enhanced visual properties of the support: the varnished grain of plywood or the reflective sheen of aluminium. I do minimal colour mixing before application, instead I select a small number of colours which get expanded upon by their bleeding together and mixing when the paint is poured.
In terms of line and marks I often work with borders and areas of containment that are both physical and compositional. For example pouring an acrylic border and then using thinner oil paint within that, or having a pool of polyurethane that oil paint will seep into from all sides. I am interested in the surrounding surface becoming a painting in and of itself, using the runoff from one painting to make a border for another. Other times paint runoff is cut out from one surface and collaged onto another with the use of thick tinted glue showing the action of glueing as gestural itself.
