conversational pieces

I have used wax a lot in my work. I am fascinated by its translucency when pure. It’s versatility too. I have since my early twenties been even drawn to the figure and anatomy.

Wax écorchés of the 16th and 17th century are a constant source to me. Wax’s material lends itself to express living flesh well, the corpse even better. Wax is central to so much that is votive, medical, and domestic; it is the magic fluid that will form the study for a sculpture, or as a medium to the encaustic that painted ancient faces on Ptolemaic mummies. It is the medium of light.

The dim persistent light of long term memories

I lived in the East End of London for fourteen years. There was a housing estate down the road that had an exterior stairwell. It was clad in frosty glass. It was dirty from the dust of the road. At night it would shine mournfully. You could see figures going up and down within. I often look for that murky dimness when I am painting. I realised recently that this stairwell was the thing I looked at the most when I lived in London. No photographs, I only have a memory of it. I made a painting in the summer 2024. It was unrelated to this memory. But as the image progressed layer by layer, the dim light that came from the piece was exactly what had fascinated me about the quality of light from the stairwell. It is the light in The Great Gatsby. I am reminded of the incomparable last sentence of the novel which ends in ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Transformation is the central spine of all art. Alchemy interested me for many years, for obvious reasons. An interest I share with many other artists. Alchemy is the black sheep twin of science. It is Science's bubbling, stinking, esoteric smear stained shadow - it is relentless hope against experience.

Simplicity requires a destructive force

Achieving an image in painting relies on an appetite for destruction. Indeed, your better judgment has to override you satisfaction for a ‘pretty’ picture. To continue working, one’s own incompetence is in charge most of the time. We struggle with it. And that is where it happens and becomes its own aesthetic. I unashamedly exploit this and take great pleasure at times obliterating a carefully made surface. Sometimes this is a perverse act, most of time it is because the work is just not good enough. Simple as that.

I went to Rome for the first time when I was twenty three. I had been a Michelangelo fan since I was six. In Saint Peter’s we went to see the renowned Pieta. I kept repeating, ‘This is alchemy, This is Alchemy’. How could marble be turned into so much grace?

My father is a chemical engineer. He worked for a company that built refineries based in the port of Antwerp. I have fond memories of driving through the port and passing the miles of pipes, stacks, flaming chimneys and plumes of water vapour rising into the sky. I always loved this alien and expressive rhythmic landscape. Function and pragmatism are compelling too.

And this of my father too. As a child I used to endlessly ask him about the stars and the universe. I probably annoyed him by repeating the same questions. But he patiently and took some delight in describing how uncanny ‘IT’ all was. It seems to me that these moments were always at the kitchen table. I used to stare at his hands and the subcutaneous structure of his veins. His beautiful hands prevail as the visual memory of these talks.

The inevitable role of deep memories in my paintings can no longer be denied. Sometimes the paintings form like blocks or piles of material and supports. Strata if you will. My sister might contend that I love piles whether it is clothes, books, or at times objects. It is a running joke.

I remember long summer days at my Nan’s house in Portsmouth when I was very young. They were splendid lazy afternoons with the TV on and sweet treats. I used to play endlessly with a square block of telephone message paper. I used to make desert islands with palm trees, shelters and boats. My concern was always more with transforming the block into landscape rather than to make a scene for characters to inhabit.

In the Piazza della Segnoria in Florence there is a copy of Michelangelo's David. It was a sweltering summer’s day in 1983. I insisted on seeing the original sculpture that was housed in the Accqdemia. My mother and I queued for ages and got in. The David was majestically placed in a huge alcove at the end of a long gallery. On either side of the leading vista were the astonishing slave sculptures. I was very young, around 6, but these emerging; struggling figures, powerfully trying to release themselves from the bondage of the stone seared themselves into my imagination forever. I was captivated by the glamour of the place and fell in love with Michelangelo the artist and fell in love with the David.

Hanging around Venice

I had three studios in Venice from 2015- 2018. The first was in a 15th century palazzo, the entrance was under a staircase by Severini. I shared this space with a mosaic artist who was 85. The place was packed with wooden boxes of every kind of stone you could think of. Huge pieces of unworked Murano glass lay about here and there.

The second studio was on the ground floor of a fine Venetian house. There were painted tromp l’œil benches in the hallway. The masonry walls of the vast studio had been covered in thick plastic. When the building moved, fragments of the wall would pitter patter down the plastic. It sounded like rain.

My last studio in Venice was a tiny, beautiful shed in the small courtyard where I lived. Here I started the small cast wax icon series. I had very little room and a hot plate. The roof leaked. I loved it.

Large or small as long as it repeats

I have been working a series of books called Fragments over the last twenty years. They are collections of images within bibliographies. I look at a wide scope of things, but I seem to gravitate towards natural structures from the tiny to the very large, but the man-made world is also very important to me. I like the rhythmic and repetitive patterns that exist within surfaces. I like things that hint at their inner working. I often look at structures that lie inside an organism, constellation or construction. Scanning a surface, we are led down and into a hinted complexity. It is like looking down a well. Is this the opposite to Sprezzatura?

The work flourishes as matter then. The pursuit of an escaping image is also the pursuit for a scrap of beauty. The macroscopic and the microscopic are absorbed into a biological surface composed of stratified layers. Again, icons come to mind however they are stripped of their sacred identity. They are gnarled, gilded objects that beg to be held. They are resilient; melancholy and shine with a murmuring failing gleam.

Manifestos are not for me. I love uncertainty. My pursuit is determined by the overwhelming excitement of chance.