Thoughts for Woon Foundation application.

Painting is a constant tug of war for me: a struggle between what kind of subject matter is relevant to painting today and how to execute a painting in a way that addresses the contemporary language of painting while mantianing a respect for traditional craftsmanship.

Craft is an ugly word in contemporary art but it is one that art makers and art audiences are always returning to. By seeing something done “well” in a painting it offers a key to start unlocking the rest of the work.

My aim is to continue to experiment with techniques and materials in a way that references traditional techniques while continuing to push the language of painting forward.

New Painting entered into Xhibit

As a painter I’m looking for the tension in the way we nurture our world view. Different media stories are consumed through the same conduit, and become distorted in their relationship to us. A new girl on page three of The Sun is given greater emphasis than a hundred people murdered in Syria; we become detached from what is real and what is unreal.

My work aims to juxtapose apparently unrelated images found in the media and online, and find relationships of form and colour. The result is to find an aesthetic beauty in something that originates in an unpalatable reality.

I Like Things Cheap and Nasty

Thoughts

 

I’m always looking for tension in the subject matter.  That tension that exists in the way we consume current affairs.  Which story takes precedent in our eyes, or in the way it is presented to us?  Kim Kardashian’s baby, Kate Middleton’s dress?  Or thousands of people being murdered by their own governments in Gazza and Syria?

Artists Statement May 2012

 

Susan Sontag wrote in The Pornographic Imagination that an artist was a freelance explorer of spiritual dangers and a broker in madness.

 

I see my role as a painter as one where I explore the psychological spaces of the human conscious that my audience might fear to tread, and the images I create are the trophies of those experiences.  The figures in my work occupy an unreal world in seductive colour that offers sinister undertones of transgression and taboo.  Uncertain narratives imply a moment in time that is unseen.

I draw upon news stories, films and pop culture to reflect back on to society its own darkest demons.  Only those already corrupted will be corruptible.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

Wayne Dyer, Psychologist