ART

‘I doodled all through school, and wandered into the great Warwick Metcalfe’s art department because it seemed like a cushy number to skive off lessons and smoke. Little did I know it would change my life.’

Here are portraits of people I have known and some visual allegories summing up my artistic life, interweaving the real and the symbolic. Countless crossroads of my existence intertwine with the subconscious freeze-frames from a surreal movie in which contemporary life flickers on into the darkness. Film and tape fast-forwarding and rewinding to the past reflecting previously experienced happenings. Photographic images, magnetic recordings, collage, tactile images, scratched clips of cine film heavy with fragmented memories and places that have influenced this life. In these paintings are scenes of events in my life that flow as a stream of consciousness – ghosts and entities from the past that have shaped this face and mind. It’s a journey that takes a two dimensional series of lines and marks all the way to the three-dimensional imitation of light and shade of the finished paintings. The illusion of relief is the very soul of drawing, and by imitating light and shade, drawing takes on the third dimension that we all know, blind or sighted. The work allows me to explore further the endless creative potential that can be achieved by combining classical artistic processes with contemporary media in a struggle for creative uniqueness and innovation. It is an attempt to unveil the mysteries of artistic creation while at the same time holding a mirror up to this life. As Francis Bacon said, “painting is its own language and is not translatable into words”, so I’ll leave it at that.