Undergrowth 3 and 7
The tiny negligible spaces that make up the dramatic scenes, the fragments of moments that we force into great narratives, these are all there is. The grand overviews are just a kind of violence that we inflict on the world and ourselves.
Respite, happiness, life and death, animals going about their lives, leaves, flowers, blades of grass, this is the undergrowth. Soft diverse, complex, it is a go-between.
Who cares about the rest? I would like to journey for ever in this miniature universe. clamber through tunnels of foliage, peer down into cathedrals of grass. But I’m stuck up here, in a heady, cold place, behind my face. My clumsy fingers can’t reach. These meagre paintings are the only vehicle at my disposal.
Ship Triptych
Crass and bombastic, the cruise ship manifests itself between crumpled, beautiful rocks and crevices of moss, a violent human insertion.
We can’t help ourselves: it’s a thing of wonder, an end point. The explosives have been ignited; transfixed, we inhabit that spilt second when the edifice still hovers in the air, still maintains its shape. But really, it is already shattered.
This painting is from a series which I have called The Human Abstract, the title of a 1794 poem by William Blake. In it he describes how humans need to create bad so they can feel good, invent religion to feel righteous, foster fear to achieve peace, and that all these ugly binary constructs don’t exist anywhere else in nature, only in us. The paintings in the series are full of such contradictions: detail woven through underpainting, human artefacts tangled up with nature, beautiful destruction, serious foolishness.
Singing sweetly from the rocky island cliffs, our fantasies are sirens, luring us into self-annihilation with a promise of happiness, an eternal cruise with every wish catered for. We’ll climb over any corpse, destroy any paradise in our attempt to reach paradise.
The Hollow Triptych
The Hollow, part underpainting, part finished work, is a lighthearted game about space, about what is real and what is not. The title is taken from the Agatha Christie novel shown lying amongst the reeds, the cover depicting a gun concealed in a red-lined egg basket. I’ve used Christie books as props in this series of paintings, because they are classic examples of genre, and I love the Tom Adams cover paintings. They are something out of my childhood, I used to get lost in the stories. A detective story takes place within the strict rules of its genre and always has a satisfying ending, which contains the story like the four edges of a canvas contain a painting. The more rules there are, the more freedom can be explored. Freedom has no meaning when the possibilities are infinite. That is why I like to make images using well-used tropes, and why I don’t really believe in good and bad art, just in generous and ungenerous art.
Birds flutter around, delineating the air. The wild reeds have cut flowers scattered over them. The tunnel offers a way out, and our minds rush down it, almost blind to the life and movement in front of us. Some sort of story is suggested, but not explained. The book, the jar, the tunnel, the cut flowers, all are human remnants. A crime may or may not have taken place. The painting is an invitation to enter, enter.
Beyond Belief
In this work, layers of belief are like thin curtains which can be swept aside. Beyond them is nothing, the untouched white space of the canvas.
You might be struck by the the painstaking technique and compositional game. Through many hours of labour, things are made to look real, and shapes and colours keep repeating and reflecting each other, in the style of academic painting.
Beyond its technique and composition, the work clearly resembles an altarpiece and could contain many references to classical religious painting: the Adam and Eve figures, the towers of edenic foliage, the self-sacrificing pelican as a medieval Christ, the vanitas mirror, the rubbish-filled memento mori still life, the monkey as the devil incarnate, the Renaissance drapery like the curtains of a stage, the broken bread evoking Dutch still lives, but also Christian communion.
In spite of all these allusions it is obvious that this painting is not religious. The figures have moles and stretch marks, the idyllic pond is an absurd paddling pool, the pelican has a quizzical glint in its eye, there is a random quality to the assemblage; it is simply an enactment, without a moral framework, beyond any belief of that kind.
A realist painting is an illusion which requires belief to function. Here the subjects, or specimens, are inside a collection of boxes, like a camera obscura, as if reality has been inverted through the tiny pinpoint of a retina. Beyond the stack of Kunstkammer is white space, which like the back of the stage set takes us beyond the belief of the illusion.
The veils of belief are insubstantial. Formal composition and technique, references to art history and religion, the illusory nature of the space: all fall away and we are left with uncertainty. The painting undermines itself: it is a large question mark. What do we believe in?
Do we believe in individual sentiments, personal stories, good and bad images, symbolism, beauty? Do we believe in the illusion of realism, and beyond that, are we convinced by reality itself? Can we locate ourselves in the confounding, infinite world?
Propped up by all kinds of belief, we cling to our shred of existence in this moment. An image is a raft, a loose collection of planks, and there are a great many unknown monsters in the deeps. A painting, or any image, or any thing, may offer nothing more than this: it seems, and so we are. Because it is out there, we can indulge in the belief that we are indeed here.
Desert Wild become a Garden Mild
The title is a line from a poem by William Blake, Little Girl Lost,in which he predicts that one day the fallen world, the desert wild, will transform into a garden mild and become Eden again. In the bible myth, Adam is punished for eating the fruit of knowledge, and told he’ll have to labour very hard to glean sustenance from the cursed, dry and thistle-strewn ground.
Perhaps, in this painting, Eden has returned. Brambly thistles rise up in front of a grand billowing cloudscape. There is no context. The humble plants become beautiful, and everything is right with the world. In a painting, this is possible – such is the delight of an image.
Little Girl Lost 2
A painting lies on the ground, framed by grassy weeds and tiny flowers. I’ve gone in, and left my brush behind on the surface, the only clue that I was there. The snake collusively guards the entrance. It’s home, it’s paradise. There, beyond, is my refuge. It’s just a painting, half scrawled, but it’s all I have, it’s taken me over, I’m lost.
The Labours of Hercules
The solid flesh fades into a few brush marks at hands and feet. The figure lies on a cloth composed of a landscape, or a landscape crumpled into a cloth. There is a bit of sky, above an Agatha Christie book, The Labours of Hercules, which shows a vulture clasping a rotten apple. The hair, the sticks and the vulture’s wings form dark striations across the canvas. Surely, if we try hard enough, we can enter the landscape. But it’s no good, we are stuck here. I am stuck here. The crumpled sheet is my painting, my eyes are closed. Like Hercules, I am trying so hard. But I keep failing. They say it is the effort that counts, but who is counting?
Beloved
On first glance this painting might seem to be about ageing, but in the end my paintings are not about anything. I like to use hints and allusions to draw you into the uncertain, open space of my world.
Three iconic paintings could spring to mind. Jacques-Louis David “The Death of Marat” (1793) is a highly constructed scene, showing Marat murdered in his bath, noble and beautiful in death. The hanging arm of Beloved speaks similarly of relinquishment.
Of course Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) is also present, with the direct gaze and powerful hand across the groin, elements which shocked the Paris art world at the time. Not a seductive, idealised girl, but a recognisable, unashamed woman.
A reproduction of “The Magpie on the Gallows” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1658) is hanging on the wall, a painting within a painting. Brueghel’s world is not interested in individuals, but rather in the spectacle of humanity in all its foolishness amidst the cycles of nature. He often used the vehicle of allegory, but with his understanding of nature and acceptance of the human condition, he transcends any narrow interpretation.
Prosaic elements, the phone, the toothbrush cup on the sink, bring us down to earth. The rooster lamp is a piece of absurdity that says that nothing should ever be taken too seriously.
Reflected in the furniture and glimpsed through the bathroom are little slices of the outside world that open up the interior and push and pull at the Brueghel landscape.
The pearl-like colours of bedding and tiles form a soft environment for the flesh, and the black sheet at the bottom of the image is like a dark gently flowing river, so that the figure almost seems to be drifting, her fingers trailing in the water.
Like all paintings this one is a projection, and the human figure gazing out serves to intensify an awareness of self. Looking in, we are thrust into the role of both lover and beloved.
Elegy for What Never Was
All kinds of things come to mind when I look at this painting. The fantastical landscapes of Dr Seuss with crazy rocks and plants. Hong Kong, because I photographed the rocks and creepers in a park there. An apocalyptic mountain of scrap metal on the outskirts of Cape Town, where I found the car. My garden. TV series like Lost and Survivor where people are artificially pitted against nature.
Perhaps it is a contemporary memento mori, a reminder that all is vanity, a fake mythological scene. The car could be an emblem of hubris, like Icarus’ stuck-on wings, its seats retaining the wear and tear of human bodies. Death is ever-present, but is negligible and rather ridiculous, fun even. Nature is indifferent.
An elegy is a sad reflection on something that has gone. An elegy for what never was must be a kind of self-indulgence. Perhaps it is an elegy for the idea of progress, that triumphal march towards a perfection that will never take place. Or perhaps it is a memorial to the image itself, a used-up thing that sells itself to the highest bidder, with maximum drama, maximum saturation.
Arcadia
Arcadia is a quiet, still place. We can’t get to it. We are stuck inside the gallery, peering through the pillars of a decaying architectural folly. The scene beyond is dark, cool, and beautiful, with an abandoned air, perhaps both frightening and enticing.
The older child, on the edge of adolescence, walks along the step between our world and the garden, while the younger child runs through the green open space, at one with nature.
A car intrudes itself on this paradise, an uncertain, violent presence. The colours of the garden are dark, muted almost to grey, and endlessly repetitive.
Distracted, we rush through the present moment, hurtling towards death, and the world is forgotten. Perhaps for a few heartbeats we can sit quietly, look out, and immerse ourselves in Arcadia.
The Two Towers
The Tolkein book, The Two Towers, lies discarded in the leaves, its cover showing a fantasy landscape, the only piece of sky in the painting.
Half-buried clothing, perhaps evidence, or just rubbish, snakes through the surface, reduced to abstract colour. With its human and natural remnants, the dance of finished and unfinished illusion, the flat surface of the canvas transformed into the flat leaf-covered ground, this painting too is an invitation to sink down and forget oneself. Death is present, but is not frightening. There is restfulness in the infinite variety and similarity of the leaves. Nothing really seems to matter.
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
The eye in the top centre, peering out through a broken mirror on the cover of the Agatha Christie book, seems to regard us from behind the painting. It is a mad, absurd, tangled mix of objects, with the only distance being supplied by a sky reflected in a hand mirror. It has a post-apocalyptic feel, as if our edifice of meaning, the importance of objects and their function, has fallen apart and been washed up in the bend of a shallow river. And yet, and yet, there are flowers and tadpoles. There is a rhythm in the way our eyes move around the chaos, there is beauty and order to be found. We can’t help hoping. We can’t help ourselves.
o is an invitation to sink down and forget oneself. Death is present, but is not frightening. There is restfulness in the infinite variety and similarity of the leaves. Nothing really seems to matter.
Home Away from Home
A home is an embodiment of the self, its corners like the thoughts in our heads, the walls blindly felt by dreams and fears, an object placed here or there like a memory. Home is the lighted windows of a boat seen at sea, or a house in the forest, a shape glimpsed through trees. Home punctuates our daily lives, we weave in and out of it, we shape it and it shapes us.
A painting is a kind of home, transforming, and transformed by our imaginations, another doorway in and out, a place we can go. It is intimate, protective, as imaginary as home itself, which only exists in as much as we can conjure it.
This series of boxes, rooms, offers once again a way through, past the curtains and carpets, into an emptiness adorned at its edges with plants. Nothing and everything is there, in that white space, and we need the idea of both, to create meaning. And while contemplating nothing and everything, we can occupy home, with our things, our walls, our bodies.
Picnic
I’m lying in the warm grass, watching an ant. I’m 11 years old, the sun is warm on my back. Back up the hill is the cool doorway of my house. I’m swimming through dots of colour, that glide over my vision as I open and close my eyes. There’s a fence, a blanket. There is only right now.
I’m 50 years old. It’s not real. But then again, nothing has been real. So maybe this place, this small piece of territory, can exist. Born out of the imagination, and fixed shimmering on a canvas, I can cling to it, spread out the blanket, gaze at the slowly waving blades of grass, and know that I am alive. I can come back, and back, and back.
Painting Space 1 and 2 and Scroll 1
Tethered loosely on the uncertain structure of a few quick, large brushstrokes, plants grip the white space of the canvas, cascading down, bowing and dancing, with just a hint of water or sky to place them. Here and there, delicate roots or leaves trace out the air.
The objects softly drift and rotate in space. The fine details tether your eye for a moment, and then the quick movement of the brush carries you away. A breeze seems to blow. You long for certainty, you are denied it. You long for freedom, you are denied it. Both possibility and finality are offered, and perhaps you can let your weary thoughts fly loose from their well-worn tracks, just for a moment, as you stop and look.