As an artist, when it comes to showing work, we want to show off our biggest bestest most accomplished pieces. The ego or maybe even something more fragile than that, wants people to know we work hard! This took ages to do! My hands are bleeding! Look at what I do when no one even knows! I came to the realisation the work I wanted to show; it’s just not time for it, so you’re getting to see THIS SHITE instead.
I love to show work of course, especially as I hate crushing paintings into a jpeg and chucking them into the quagmire with no sense of old fashioned dignity for the medium at all. Planning for shows creates an unwelcome array of annoying tasks to complete. The headfuckery of resolving work and selecting what should be seen and how, is a brutal vulnerability. With that however, comes a sensitivity to what is currently important.
RED HOT was a title that came to me, so embarrassingly, during meditation. Whoever-the-fuck on the guided session said ‘imagine your sense of confidence and power as a glowing colour inside you’. Beamer I know, but I didn’t stutter; RED. If you restrict your palette you can reduce distractions a bit which can be a useful tool. I restricted my paint to reds to complete these studies. I wanted to access something close to the bone, a wee bit bloody. It’s harder to do that when you’ve free range of the entire palette.
This body of work is mainly studies, all within the past year, and a set of four older pieces.
To make anything worth ascribing any meaning to, it’s vital to submit and humble yourself to the work acknowledging the pace at which it must go. For me, I keep drawing and drawing and painting and painting the same fucking thing that is just coming out when I put pencil to paper over and over. Wringing it out like water from a shitty rag. The feeling of pencil to paper is the compulsion. The feeling of painting is relief. The work shows me where it wants to go, it will show me if I focus on the paint itself.
These pieces are complete and transitional.
Those wee guys like robot dog things that keep appearing? I dunno who they are, but looking back at some older work I thought of them. I made these robot guy action figure things and they were part of a large body of work called THE ART OF BLASPHEMY and these APOCALYPSE GUYS were there telling everyone to ‘kill all hetros’ and ‘it’s Adam and Steve you morons’ to the kids. Basically a piss take of the 80/90s Christian Cult rhetoric I grew up with. I work a lot with blasphemy but this work was all red and black. Another reason I started working with red again. I thought these guys have more work to do-it’s not over. But those guys are tired these are their sons or their pet’s or something and ‘THEY’RE BACK’ and I’m still painting them into existence - no idea. See more of this previous work HERE and HERE and HERE
The four older pieces ‘pulpit shoes’ - there is unfinished business with them. The Idea of a shoe that’s stairs is funny af. At a studio visit my agent asked me about these paintings and her face of concern for my wellbeing when I said ‘Just thought imagine stairs were a shoe lol’ is what keeps these relevant for me. If I can keep the stupid art world worried, then I’m doing my job.
The structural paintings and bits of logs are things I often paint - drawing or painting the structures help me think clearly which in turn helps me figure out larger in-studio concerns. Sometimes they take on a life of their own. Sometimes it’s chaff blown to the side so I can see the wheat clearer.
Painting isn’t about being clever or thinking what to paint. Painting is about paint. Working. monogamous to your work, to the exclusion of all others. It is fucking cardinal.
Anyway, being an artist is so embarrassing: So here’s some recent pieces I guess Jesus Christ