“Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way…”
-Vincent Van Gogh
My work is a kind of codified auto-biography. Plunging into imaginative and observational approaches, I surface with images which seem personally meaningful, whilst also resonating with larger political and philosophical themes. Often I am preoccupied by the confluence of patriarchal gender norms, capitalism and humanist exceptionalism which underwrites the anthropocene.
However, the work included in this show is even more personal than usual, charting a period of emotional turbulence; going through a divorce and falling in love again during the last few years of multiple pandemic lockdowns. Each painting externalises my feelings to create a trace or residue of what I was going through. Sometimes it seems obviously apparent, at others the true subject is only hinted at.
My work has gradually pushed towards a synthetic cubist language which enables images to overlay and enmesh with slippery, paradoxical boundaries, to suggest a messy nuanced truth usually disguised by simplistic binaries of male vs female, man vs nature. Usually each painting emerges from my imagination, informed by sketches and ideas both seen and dreamed.
Recently I have returned to painting directly from a model (my partner and friends), which enables me to paint with extreme speed and directness. I am interested in the energy transmitted by the sitter, but ultimately each painting expresses feelings entirely my own.
