Ebb and Flow

The paintings I am currently making explore, amongst other things, the ambiguous and often fluid juncture between abstraction and representation. Hovering on the threshold of figuration, the brush-strokes teeter between signalling some form of human activity or celestial body and dissolving into more purely abstract passages. The works draw on both art historical tradition and painterly technique and are done on a modest scale with a tentative, intuitive feel for colour and mark-making so that they are not definitive or bombastic, but maintain a sense of open-endedness and mystery. Though the subtle tones and gentle paint application of my recent paintings gives them a veneer of delicacy, there is often also something more direct and urgent which underpins them. They often portray some sort of explosion or implosion, like a slow, gradual build-up to a cathartic release, which mirrors my own painting process. Both fragile and forceful, spontaneous and highly considered, the paintings contain a certain tension. They depict different states of being and different kinds of spaces that operate both visually and emotionally.