Talk given at the opening of Fever Dream, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
29th March 2025
The title of a show, and any understanding at all I have about what I’ve been doing, always comes at the end. While I’m doing it, I sort of have glimmers of ideas, but really don’t know why I’m doing it and where it’s going. So in the last weeks as the work has come to an end, I’ve been thinking about these paintings and why the title “Fever Dream” felt right to me.
I started with the most basic premise: in order to survive, we have to make meaning of our lives. We don’t want to completely lose the plot, so we’d better make a plot!
Although we are propelled by a mostly unconscious mix of instinct, survival drive and cravings, we are driven to justify our actions with reasoning. Knowing we live short lives, and in the face of our current unimportance and future absence, we must cling to our rationales. Our reasons for what we do, and how the world is, are as varied as the individual human beings that we are. For me it sometimes feels like clinging to one of eight billion fragments of a raft in the open sea. If we let go of these small bits of meaning, these reasons for being, we could drown in confusion and disorder.
I often wonder what art actually is, and what it’s for. If art has a reason to exist at all, which I’m not at all sure about, I think it’s to provide a safe space in which those pieces of meaning and logic can be allowed to drift apart, so that a hint of the inexplicable can be apprehended, but without the risk we would feel in real life. It can take a lot of energy and even anger to defend our reasons for being. Art can allow us to let go for a moment. That’s what art is for in my life, a holding space where my anxious, striving mind can rest.
I saw a documentary on Miyazaki, the head of the Japanese Studio Ghibli animation studio, in which a colleague said of him: “He blows away the line between fantasy and reality”. In real life, we need that line to survive. Perhaps instead of a line I can call it a membrane, between the box-like frameworks of rationality in which we live, and the amorphous, swelling, fearful, joyful world of the imagination, of dreams. Art ruptures that membrane. These painted worlds of so-called realism are just illusions, which means that they are safe. We will not go mad, but we can feel a certain freedom not ordinarily to be felt. Art is like a waking dream, where we retain our sense of self while allowing the imagination to expand its range, into both joyful and frightening places.
Going Under:
Perhaps I will start with the toughest painting in the show, plunge you into the deep end and move towards a happier conclusion! I see a painting itself, the flat canvas and applied paint, as an actual membrane, a kind of skin between reality and fantasy. And in much the same way, our very bodies are contained just by this layer of skin, which presents an outward coherence onto which we project our ideas of ourselves and others. In this self-portrait my consciousness is fading, I am going under, which is the title of the painting…and we are going under the pierced surface of my skin, to witness the stuff inside me. There are signs of an institution, perhaps some kind of hospital, but the structure is minimal, the curtains are absurdly short, as if both I and you are dreaming. There is no structured context to grasp onto. Order and decorum have no place here.
I often get asked why I paint on such a large scale. The size enables you to imagine placing yourself into this space on a visceral level, while of course remaining an onlooker. All paintings are like this. We are both OF them, because we enter them in our imaginations, and for ever separated. And perhaps life is like this too. We are part of the world and the human hive, but also somehow alone, walled off by our physical boundaries, the limitations of our bodies, the blindness of our perceptions.
Disarray:
I guess in this exhibition I’ve looked for different ways to puncture this membrane between reality and fantasy, playing with the idea of how we live with a layer of order, over what feels like bottomless disorder. I love how a painting is outside time. Even the most wild action is halted, a single moment occupying all moments. In “Disarray”, the veneer of our social order is cracked. The limbic brain is in full swing, fight or flight is in play. Rage has taken hold in the domestic realm, where it so often plays out. While writing about the painting, I had to think about what rage actually is. Surely just a response to a profound threat to our sense of who we are. And what is our sense of who we are? A delicate construct, bolstered by a moral framework, fed by ego, by an idea of our rights and entitlements, and not so much our responsibilities, or what we can give. This sense of who we are is fragile and liable to be exploded by others. My sons had a lot of fun posing for this one and I like the idea that it’s two brothers fighting, it reminds me of myths like Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus. They don’t fight in real life!
Spoils
Perhaps instead of saying I am piercing the membrane between reality and dreams, I could say I am presenting a world which has its own illogical logic. I want my paintings to feel inevitable. However odd a dream is, it always feels true – we don’t question it. It’s the same thing with fairytales. We accept that unlimited porridge flows from the fairytale porridge pot, in the same way that this still life, surrounded by dancing butterflies, tricks our brains, so that we perceive it as a kind of unquestioned reality. And it’s that quality of truth I look for. It’s a truth not borne out of certainty, but born out of that which is not spoken, perhaps not even thought. It is a truth born from the deepest recesses of the imagination and of emotion. Surely the more certain we are about something, the more space there is for thoughtless conviction, which can lead to cruel actions. So the truth I love is an uncertain truth. This is of course paradoxical. And especially so, as the things in my paintings seem real. But so do dreams and visions. We know they are not real, but we feel that they are. I love this contradiction, it seems to allow an expansion of heart and mind.
All the Delight in the World
In this one, “All the Delight in the World” I have caged the wonder, the beauty, used elements that have been used so often that they have become kitsch. But kitsch doesn’t bother me, kitsch just symbolises the security and comfort of pretty things passed from hand to hand, from birthday card to instagram story. The bars of this cage are again a reminder of that membrane, that layer between reality and the world of dreams, and pose the question: is the swan caged by us, or are we caged in our perceptions? Perhaps it can be both.
People often ask me where I get my reference, so I’ll say a bit about it here. Most of the things I my paintings come from my own photographs, mixed with just making stuff up. I crept up close to this swan on the shore of an Italian lake, on a cool, cloudy afternoon. I was terrified of it! The roses I photographed in a garden. The bars are made up, I found a couple of pictures of rust and went from there. The ground is half made up, with bits pulled from various photos. So I use photography almost like a kind of note-taking as I live my life, and sometimes don’t use them for years, or ever. And then suddenly something will fit what I didn’t even know I was looking for. I think most artists would say that ideas can’t be forced. They emerge out of my life like whole, complete kernels, which just need a bit of care and time to come into being.
Seeing Things
There is not only joy in piercing the membrane of reality, but of course, there’s pain too. In our dreams we act alone. Sleeping Beauty is alone in the fairytale The witch lives alone in her gingerbread house. The forest is a lonely place, full of invisible fears. The hallucinations of fever dreams, born from illness, carry us where no-one can follow. This series of drawings called Seeing Things, and the bath drawing, Unthinkable, perhaps reflect this feeling most directly.
It’s the feeling of being disembodied, as if I am floating, both running towards and away from something I can’t name. My body in all its ageing reality is exposed to the world but mostly to myself. The sheets seem to have come alive. The lid has been lifted and all my fears are creeping out, taking up residence in the darkness surrounding me. I could never stand here before you naked, but I can show myself naked here. Drawings and paintings are like storage spaces, with hooks upon which to hang my shame, my panic and dread. It is ok to feel it here, uncomfortable perhaps, but not life-threatening, because this is an illusory place. Painting can be a kind of mediation of our most painful, frightening feelings.
Forever and a Day
A few works address our enchantment with things, getting them, having them, wanting ever more of them, chucking them. And the interaction of nature with our leavings. This painting I have called “Forever and a Day”. We feel that we will live forever and we grab at stuff, using it as props in the life stories we tell ourselves. We have no regard for where it goes. I absolutely love second hand things, almost everything I have has been owned by someone else. I feel more comfortable buying something that has been used, cleaning it, making it mine, and passing it back into the general pool of used objects when I’m done with it. I keep thinking of this trail of things we leave behind us, clogging up the air, water, and ground. We are in a trance of acquisition, objects are the ultimate symbols of the strange rationales we employ to make sense of life. Their beauty and use is entirely subjective, dependent on their context on our shelves and in our hands. So to place them out of context, in various stages of decay, is to once again pierce that membrane of order. For me there is also a tremendous nostalgia in these objects, which are like anthropomorphised ghosts, exhalations from long-forgotten lives. This painting is a memento mori, a reminder of our mortality, but also bursting with little pieces of life, the flowers, birds, worms – and even a mole, poking out its nose to sniff the air!
To Be Possessed
I am ending with this painting, because it is, in a way, a personal statement about painting itself. I feel like I’m addicted, and I use that word very consciously, to chasing after this open-ended, dreamlike reality. I have been under a spell since I could hold a pencil. This painting, which is called To Be Possessed, reflects a paradox. That I paint to discover what life actually is, but painting takes up most of my life. Wrapped up in the beauty of the world to the point where it’s growing into my clothes and becoming one with me, I am nonetheless turned inward, lost in an enchantment of my own making. Painting is an internal state. I am caught up in its demands, like a child in an instructive fairy tale, forever pursuing an unattainable prize, following a trail of breadcrumbs to an unknown destination. Meanwhile, life flies by. What I have come to realise, is that the prize is right here in front of me, it’s the pursuit itself, it’s each breath we take, each moment we exist. It is letting go of certainty, through flights of imagination. It is allowing ourselves to feel wonder.