Darkness (in)visible

First of all I want to write about the wondrous large untitled work of Ad Reinhardt as it was installed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last time I was there. Reinhardt is one of my artistic heroes: in his work the revenge of painting against photography is taken to new peaks of intensity, his works are unreproducible, a photograph of a late Reinhardt is literally almost nothing.

Most of my art-history training would encourage me to focus on the painting as an object, as effectively something bracketed-off from the world in which we come upon it. 

Art history generally doesn't look at matters "outside" the frame of the painting and this willful erasure of how a work presents itself is enshrined in the practice of photographing work that in fact, in the world, on the wall of any museum or owner, has an elaborate frame, as if it bore none, as if its actual situation of presentation were nothing. Through photography paintings are continually being reduced to images: texture, scale, surface, edge, frame, position, height, lighting, dialogue with other works are continually occluded. 
It is this phenomenon that Benjamin was really writing about in the celebrated essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility". Of course all that gets reproduced in photography is the image and what is not reducible to the image, what Benjamin called the "aura" is left to its own devices. 
When I was taught about this essay I took it to mean that somehow the reproducible image had "won" over painting, over the claims that every painting makes for its own unique way of being in the world. It is entirely regrettable to me that this essay is so continuously taken to mean that somehow painting is dead, that it has lost its aura or that it should never have had one: I hear young artists so often make similar claims, usually linked to the fact that painting has a merely "historical" legitimacy and has effectively been superseded by whatever medium is fashionable at the moment (back in the 1980's it was video, nowadays its probably digital technology and the sort of high-tech special effects one sees at international arts fairs these days). 
My experience of the SFMOMA Reinhardt and a great many other painters in the so-called "monochrome" tradition, in the flesh as they say, reveals only that the "auratic" work of art, which is to say the "auratic" experience of a work of art is still possible and that the claim that photography has led to the "death" of the "aura" is completely false: the unreproducible nuances of colour, surface and texture in a Reinhardt, Marden, Rothko or Ryman are still there to be found if one looks hard enough and no amount of photographic reproduction could capture such an experience.
This is one reason why it pleases me greatly that no single photograph can capture the nuances of shifting colours displayed by my own works: that fact that at least 2 pictures would be necessary to capture the field of colour set up by my work means that there is still visual experience possible without any sort of reduction to the image.
For me, the monochrome tradition is valuable precisely because of this necessary attention to nuance: the monochrome is at once before and after the image.

The history of representational painting, from at least the origins of perspective (whether simple or  distorted, single or multiple), has dominated not just what people expect from painting but also what they do in front of one: the frontal view is the most important, it is best experienced from a frontal position, ideally with the eye of the viewer parallel, in all senses of the word, to the vanishing point in the illusory depth of the construction.

For this reason I prefer photographs of my work from an oblique angle and featuring the wall, the sliver of space behind the painting and most importantly the very edge of the frontal surface, where the frontal plane curves off and becomes the perpendicular sides of the canvas. 

Even abstract painting is arguably dominated by the concept of representation and a geometry of viewing that privileges an identification of the frontal surface of the support with a so-called "picture-plane". 

The contemporary popularised version of principles articulated by Greenberg which focus on the putative "flatness" of the picture plane could only have been made by someone who did not pay attention to the edges of real stretched canvases. The curvature, that swerving change of direction made by stretching over a frame, is completely fascinating to me precisely because it is so often ignored.

The ignorance serves a clear purpose - that painting be reducible to the picture plane or that, in short, the painting be a picture (even a non-representational one).

For me, the best paintings are those that reward a refusal to give in to that ignorance - they reward the oblique, the view from the side, from below, from above, whilst in motion, in the time it take to change focus, the change of viewpoint from sitting to standing for example.

Such an idea is enacted daily in the way that people look at paintings especially. I have seen it myself, they stand in front for roughly the time it takes to take a photograph which, in some cases they do as well, as if to verify the object as something which has been seen, something that verifies their presence there. Most of the time it is what the French characterise as an "instantanee", a snap-shot which opens and shuts the gaze. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it's a longer exposure but the experience with the work remains part of a chain of instants or moments that is usually festooned as well with great narratives, histories, interpretations, etc etc ad infinitum.

Next time you are in a museum, especially one with famous works of art, watch how people look rather than . . . watch.

For me, the paintings I love best are those which one must watch rather than look at. 

Why the shift in register there from "looking" to "watching"? Watching implies waiting, patience, care, duration, expectation, intensity not just extension although it is also implied that watching takes time, is a way of marking time even as you give it over to watching. You watch something you want to have, you watch what you are hunting, you watch something that draws you in and won't let you go, you watch out for something, you keep watch over something and time flows differently then, as space contracts so the thing watched might expand to fill it - it turns the viewer into an observer, even to the extent that one can be made more aware of one's own observation.

So let's watch what happens when you approach this piece by Ad Reinhardt.

The work, a taller one than the familiar 5-foot square "black paintings", is hung next to a doorway or opening in the wall on which the work is hung. On walking through the opening I faced (for at least a moment) the same direction as the painting, looking towards the opposing wall. I could only see the work itself with some sort of movement, a re-orientation towards what was behind me at the moment I walked through the opening. 

On account of the slightest difference in reflectance between two almost identical "blacks" I could see a slight flash of light on the central element of the more or less invisible forms, only for a second whilst walking in a curve towards it. It appeared only from a particular angle, where the light entered into a sort of creative interference with the surface, in a way that, according to his published comments on the importance of a non-reflective surface, Reinhardt would not have authorised. 

I was amazed however by what immediately seemed to be a painting that says "hello there" or "how is it going?" to you. For an instant I could have believed that an ostentatiously self-conscious or consciously "staged" work such as Reinhardt's could in fact appear self-aware, possessing a kind of consciousness including an awareness that it is being seen right there and then. 

This still fascinates me even as I reconstruct the act of perceiving the work in memory, from memory.

How might one paint in such a way that rewards the viewer from all angles? That throws into doubt the primacy of the frontal view, that takes into account the physical movement of the viewer towards, away from, around the work itself. We all know that paintings do not move but art history and criticism tends to ignore the movement of the viewer in the space around the work.

This space is my real point of interest these days.

I often tell people that my real interest is not making images but creating a space where various fugitive fleeting images can come to presence: as I stop the process when I can see myself in the surface they are, in effect, portraits of the viewer whereby I am only the first viewer.

". . . du vide inguerissable" (from the incurable void)

The text from great French surrealist poet and resistance fighter Rene Char, "du vide inguerrissable / surgit l'evenement / et son buvard magique" has often preoccupied me lately.

It says, in short, that the event looms up suddenly, surges up into presence even, from an incurable nothingness, an inconsolable void accompanied by a magical blotter, a drinker or eraser of . . . of what precisely? the void? the event? or the surging into presence itself? 

Or is the event that which blots out, as if by magic, the nothingness in and from which the event is given?
What might it mean to consider the painting, the way it comes into presence from almost nothing, as an event?
Painting is usually considered and practiced as a means of representation, a means of producing or capturing an image that is somehow "like" what we might see: Holbein's portraits are for me the greatest examples of what I would call representational presence, they have an effect of presenting, in flesh and blood as it were, the lived experience of the presence of someone. One almost does not simply contemplate or view a Holbein portrait: one goes to meet it. 
I am happiest with my own work when it has a character that I would describe as magical, in the sense of an unexpected, surprising, inexplicable or otherwise wonderful event. One such event occurred at the opening of my last solo show "TOUCH" at the Lane Gallery where at about half past 7 the setting sun hit the glass skin of the Lumley building nearby and reflected directly onto the piece shown in the photograph here. This was totally unexpected and, for the time it lasted, set the piece on fire. Most of my subsequent work and even the basic ideas of my installations have been directed towards making such events possible.

I am very attracted to the idea of a work being illuminated in a particular way just once a year, when the sun happens to interact with the architecture in such a way that a wall and hence what is on the wall come under direct illumination, perhaps only once per year, as if the work were a kind of sundial, as if the work were a way of spatialising the passage of time itself. 
Of course the effects produced by my works are totally explicable, all it takes is high-school level optics and a bit of chemistry and the effects are totally exposed for what they are: what I am calling the "magical" is a more or less fictive effect of unpredictability or un-repeatability. 
Because my working practices are fairly spontaneous my works are unrepeatable, unique. Even when I have (as I often do) work on two or more related works at once what surprises me are the great differences that arise simply from random, unconscious, unpredictable differences of atmospheric condition, lighting, placement.

(T)HERE

Why "(t)here"?

What is named, or rather not named, but indicated, pointed to in this impossible "(t)here"? Which is to say, why "here" and/or "there", at the same time and alternatively? Would it mean to be "here" and "there" at the same time or is that, as we say, neither here nor there?
We say that something is "neither here nor there" to mean that something does not matter.
. . . as if to matter, to be material, significant, important to us, something must be either here, with us, or there.
To say, in the most general way, that something exists we might say "there is . . .".
So why "(t)here"?
This title imposed itself upon me (I resisted it for a long time), but came to be the most appropriate way of describing the space opened up by the works themselves in the way they relate first of all to their placement on walls, in corners or on floors.
I have often had to photograph my works in the studio, both for reference, but also for competition entries and the like. 
It has become almost impossible for me to photograph my works in the accepted, normative way, the way paintings are reproduced in books, without frame, reduced to the mere reproducible image, without scale, without environment, without reflection.
The surfaces of my works make photography almost impossible. You always see yourself taking the photograph, they reflect other works, the sky, the walls, other viewers.
This is not something I aim for but it is not regrettable that they are difficult to convey in photographic reproduction: the sort of things that interest me are not JPEG-ready.
Now when I photograph my work I always try to include the floor, in particular the angle that the wall makes with the floor, both to imbue the image with something of a sense of scale and also in order to emphasise that we do not float before a painting, we do not magically materialise before a painting, least of all mine: we approach it, mostly on foot, we walk towards it to see it.
Our experience of most painting therefore involves some sort of placement on a floor, walking or standing upright, facing a wall on which a painting is placed.
Looking at a painting we stand "here" before it, where "here" names a certain patch of the floor that we occupy in order to see the painting there on the wall before us.
Where is "here"?

I took the photograph at the right underneath my neighbour's house where enough light came through the window shown to keep alive a small, proportionally related patch of ferns.
To me it still says, somehow, everything about my painted work and how I conceptualise it.
It is in some ways the effect I am after: I would prefer that a painting be thought of as a window or doorway onto what is outside than as a mirror.
When Gertrude Stein memorably said of Oakland (if I recall correctly) that there was no "there" there she articulated in a negative form exactly what I am after in my installation of works. 
I want to evoke a strong sense of the "there" - I want to make a place, a place in the sense of some area, not necessarily well defined or bordered but not just empty space, space charged with some sort of intensity, some sort of qualitative difference from the void, however minimal.
For me the work, the painting there on the wall or in the corner or on the floor is above and before all else some way of making a place appear.
Every work of art, even those that appear to "say" little else, always  says "here" or "there", in their brute presentation of something, themselves at first. 
Even an empty gallery, like the "voids" of Yves Klein, at the very least, presents "something" even if that something is almost nothing. 
An exhibition, that is a kind of spectacle directed entirely towards the presentation of something to someone, is always at the very least a way of saying "there" as in "there you go", "here look at this", "voila!".
So first of all "(t)here" is the name for the works themselves as a whole but in addition when you are there in the space, there with the works, there in that shared world the works and their viewers make, each of them effectively also says "here", as in "look here".

"Look here" always implies a "from there". Now because the sensations presented by my works change when viewed from here, or from there, because they present themselves to the viewer in the midst of a passage between here and there, each of them sets up an elementary differential between the place where the viewer is and where the work is.
I have often told people that I paint nothing, I certainly do not make pictures of things or places but at all times things and places are reflected in my works: this reflection cannot be avoided so in effect my works change depending on where and how they are installed.
In addition the reflective surfaces of most of my work ensures that at all times the viewer can see the space in which they find themselves reflected in the surface of the work. 
The viewer can see at all times what the work itself could "see" if it could see - including the viewer him or herself, other works, the outside, the passage of the sun through the day.
"Here" and "there" are the names of the most general definitions possible of space.
It seems that "here" is always, already "here" where I am, in the here and now.
Imagine yourself saying "here" to yourself while pointing to where "here" might be. Would you not point to your feet? or to your heart?
If you imagine then pointing from "here" to "there" where is "there"?
What is indicated as "there" is always at least at arm's length away, it's always over there or out there. I imagine your hand moving out from your heart to an arm's length away, in an expansive curvilinear gesture like the sign language for love.
What horizon is being marked out (t)here?
Is the "there" the same "there" as in "there is . . ."?
A painting is always somehow "there" in the sense of "over there" even if we, here and now, momentarily share the space it inhabits with it, we can move close to it, approach it from a distance but it always remains there where we are then.
My work situates itself in a mobile and changing threefold relation between situated work, specific space and mobile viewer.
This is the real "subject matter" of my work and it is one reason why I think of myself as an installation artist who uses painting rather than simply a painter.
My works are not just pictures of nothing, they aim to make the viewer aware of the radius of their vision, its necessary anamorphosis and perspective, in short these works aim for a kind of proprioception of the conditions of viewing themselves.
Does it matter that I also think of my work as one long love song to light?

"Monochromes"

For some time now I have worked on a series of “monochromes” utilising recently developed iridescent materials, so-called “interference” pigments, primarily utilised by the cosmetics, architectural, automotive, printing and security industries.
Unlike normal absorption pigments which are themselves intrinsically, permanently “coloured” in their material substance and transfer their colour immediately to the painted surface these “interference” pigments are in fact white powders in their normal state: they are not themselves coloured, they produce colour.
Because I effectively make monochromes which do not have a singular unique invariable colour I say they are “monochromes”.
Like all works in the monochrome tradition my works renounce representation, they give up on compositional or perspectival complexity in favour of an “all-over” application of material on a surface of some sort: the major difference with my work recently is that because of the large number of separate layers applied I can sand through the layers on the edges revealing other things underneath the surface.
Interestingly the monochrome started out as a joke and has kept for the public a whiff of the comic or the absurd (if not for artists - most monochrome artists I have encountered are deadly serious). 
In Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy a completely black page jokingly represents the melancholy of the eponymous hero but the earliest monochrome paintings were in fact jokes produced by a group of proto-Dadaists who called themselves Les Incoherents in late 19th century Paris.
 In the early 1880's a member of the group, Alphonse Allais, exhibited a piece of stretched red fabric entitled Apopleptic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Edge of the Red Sea, a work that makes its point by identifying a verbal description sufficient to conjure up the concept of “red” in both imaginary figure and fictive background.
 The jocular title works to identify the possible sensation of red with both figure and ground, works by effectively saying "red figures on red background", hence denying the possibility of distinguishing between figure and ground, and works in addition by coupling this conceptual identification of figure and ground with a visual presentation of red material (originally red cloth) without giving this presentation any obvious internal relationships at all other than those forced upon it by the title.
What is so interesting to me about these early "joke" monochromes is that they explicitly identify the monochrome project with the avoidance of figure/ground relationships and the identification of part and whole.
In a recent issue of Tate Etc there was a short text about an Yves Klein IKB monochrome. A small enlarged detail was provided as an illustration but ended up looking like the whole: a blue field of a certain size and proportion. 

The fact that a part can not only resemble but effectively stand in for, supplant or replace the whole means that the monochrome can always be taken as its own repetition.
. . . the repetition that forms the work itself is a kind of temporalising, spatialising difference machine that congeals time in layers.
By incessantly repeating the origin of painting, incessantly re-founding or re-grounding the project of painting by stripping painting back to its bare fundamentals, the monochrome at the same time opens up possibilities only made visible by the attention to the most minimal factors of the production of the painting.
For some artists and writers (and arguably this is why the monochrome can appear as something historical in the sense of something already achieved) the monochrome can appear as the end of painting: the blank impotence of a dead end.
. . . as a monochrome painter one effectively uses an impersonal visual language, any monochrome looks at first much like any other, any monochrome at first glance is the repetition of all other monochromes.
It is precisely this emptying out of "signification" which means that each new work is also, at the same time, a new beginning, open onto an unforeseeable future.
Nuance is all when everything has been reduced to the minimum and if painting survives today it is because painting is above all else the art of nuance.
I find this concentration on minimal details, on the bare materials and processes of painting something rewarding myself, something that has trained my eye now to focus on precisely those details of seeing perhaps because the only marker of spatial relation or scale in the monochrome tradition is that of texture.
Texture, in the sense of the grain, the felt materiality of the work and micro-perceptual details effectively reward the vigilance of the extended gaze: these works take time.
My works appear as "monochromes" strictly speaking only when photographed: they are monochromes without the "mono" or where they are so only in an ironic sense.

Take for example the work photographed here called Topos (from the Ancient Greek word for “place”) where the violet that is seen in the photograph is not violet pigment, not a violet substance intrinsically that colour but violet light and this light can be seen shining, in its fleeting insubstantiality, onto the chair in front of the work. The violet is seen only from the front and from approximately 45 degrees to either side the violet changes to silver, to a greenish gold and to a deep turquoise from the most oblique angle. 
The pigment that produces these effects transmits coloured light in shifting frequencies by means of phase-shifting of light striking thin platelets of borosilicate coated with a microscopic layer of titanium dioxide, still the most ubiquitous of white pigments, the whitewash of last century.
Just as each grain of interference pigment is in fact a complex, reflective, translucent laminate each of my “monochromes” is a similar laminate repeated at a much larger scale, made of multiple transparent layers over a black or neutral ground.
As the viewer moves in the hemispherical space around the work this movement causes what is seen to change in a manner that sometimes suggests the work is “aware” of the viewer, “reacting” to the viewer in the space they momentarily share: arguably the work on the wall, held there silent and unmoving, is merely a pretext for the unpredictable movements the viewer makes in space, a movement provoked by colour and light as if space itself were coloured.
At my last exhibition a friend found himself rocking back and forth and walking from side to side and became very aware of his feet and where he was moving: he became aware of a whole choreography of space opened up by the work.
It is precisely this consciousness of the viewer’s embodied, situated, lived experience relative to the work, that sense of “seeing oneself” in the act of seeing, that I want to encourage.
I want viewers to question what they see, how and from where they see: not because there is too little to see (a conventional criticism of the monochrome) but because there is too much perceivable for any sort of totalising synthesis.
Most works of art, especially painting, remain in thrall to the idea of a single viewpoint, ideally right in front, from where the multiplicity of impressions are meant to cohere into a single image: the “image” presented by most painting is able to be captured in photographic reproduction, is something non-temporal but instantaneous, can be seen all at once and does not change significantly when viewed from an oblique angle.
My work intends to reward the view from an oblique position: certain things are only visible from the sides.
With photographic reproduction pervasive and the world seemingly dedicated to the mindless consumption of images, the image presented by the work of art, in general, is now that which can be duplicated in a photograph: it is in this sense that what is essential about my work is what cannot be seen all at once, what takes time and space to unfold, what changes when the direction and colour of light changes, what requires you to move to become visible.
So colours play and flash across the surface of the work as if the work were a screen, through highly reflective varnish that provides in addition a reflection of the viewer in their act of viewing — but what is reflected back to the viewer is nothing more than the contingency and partiality of viewing itself.
My works are an attempt to clear a space, to make a clearing in which unpredictable things might come to pass, especially as a viewer passes in front of the work or moves around it: my goal, were I able to put it simply, is to make a place, a place where seeing itself is what comes to be seen in all its randomness, fluctuation and unpredictability.

Layering / History / Process

This piece is called Chora, from the word "meaning", if it had any, variously, receptacle or nurse used so ambiguously by Plato in the Timaeus.
It was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards 2008.  Now, since the photograph at left was taken, I have sanded back the surface to reduce the impact of some minor damage and re-varnished the whole work, to such an extent that one of the long sides now presents transparent thick drips of wet-looking highly reflective varnish.
This piece uses cosmetics grade interference pigments, dioxazine violet glazes and various mixtures with the interference colour, over thin, sanded layers of ground stainless steel in acrylic polymers, on black and white gesso on thick raw linen, on cedar stretchers. 
The back of the stretcher is painted in fluorescent pink that reflects the ambient light back onto the wall producing a warm shadow of the painting against the wall that can barely be seen but which transforms, through complementary contrast, the colour seen at the very back edge of the canvas.
This is one major feature of my work: the attention to all aspects of the stretched canvas or linen support, especially those not visible from the front.
All the colours one sees in this photograph are normally seen sequentially as the viewer moves in the space. Here I used artificial light from two sources to show in one image the range of colours presented by this work.
Into several of the layers there are scratched, ruled grids which can be seen still on the glossy but still textured, and in a kind of digital-cloth texture, surface of 2 by 4 foot piece. The grid presents the same 1:2 proportion of the surface as a whole.
One of the more obvious features of my work is this incessant layering: the piece pictured here, Chora, acquired "her" name because of the way the surface not only reflected but transformed the available light and other colours in its vicinity. 
This work required up to 100 layers of transparent media, pigments, glazes and varnishes together with interleaving isolation coats and all subject to repeated sanding by hand sometimes for hours at a stretch.
This is one reason for the increasing "coagulation" of the sides of my newer works. Generally one could date my work by the presence or absence of drips although the drips have always been there one way or another at every point in the process, the question was, whether or not to remove or "correct" them.
One of the many "rules" I apply in the process of making the work is that of treating an untreatable accident as if it were a natural part of the process: the word ruling these rules is acceptance (and therefore repetition). 
This usage of rules is one thing that is only apparent in my work when seen in ensembles of varying sizes: this is why a number of the works require other works nearer or further away, but in some sort of structural/formal relation to them.
I tend to think of my works as ensembles, almost in the operatic sense.
I would love to design the sets for a favourite opera one day: one reason why I cannot call myself a "minimalist" is that, unlike I believe most of the major figures of minimalism, the accusation of "theatricality" levelled at it by Michael Fried, does not trouble me. I welcome the theatricality of all installational modes of presentation because theatricality automatically brings back the actual experiential body of the  viewer onto centre stage, and brings with it an eroticism as well.
My favourite opera is still Mozart's Cosi and part of the reason why is that through the course of a long two act tragicomic opera he uses every possible small sub-grouping of a larger ensemble: the whole is more than the sum of its parts precisely because only rarely is the whole, the tutti, used prominently. It features solo arias, duets, trios including the sublime "Soave sia il vento", quartets, quintets and sextets: it is an ensemble of ensembles, a formal polyphony, a game of symmetry and asymmetry to match the effortless musico-theatrical counterpoint of its text and music. 
As my works are conceived as ensembles, duets, trios or more complex interactions of individual pieces I tend to think of myself as less a painter than an installation artist.
Each work is the result of the way the others come to be as I work on a whole body of work simultaneously and this often means that the layers applied to one start to appear on other works. The only traces left of these layerings can sometimes be seen through the curved edge I often produce by sanding or the increasingly baroque grotesqueries of the drips along the sides.

Each new layer is often repeated across whole swathes of the series I am working on, being erased, sanded, glazed or finally varnished when a certain closure is implied.

My work ends up being the result of the closure of an implicitly infinite process of layering, the glossy top-coat being the sign of a closure, not an opening: they are the punctuation of a process whereby one continually paints the same painting, repainting and erasing, in search of something that will hum on the wall or anywhere it is placed. The serial repetition of bands that marked my earlier works now re-appears in the "shallow depth" of the more layered works: often pairs of works are made at the same time using exactly the same materials but in a different permutation leading to a different appearance but with identical materials.

"Artist Statements"

For some artists I guess the phenomenon of the "artist statement" is a somewhat regrettable one. A lot of artist statements I have read have the scent of coercion about them as if they would rather do anything than talk about their work.
All too often I find that reading what an artist says their work is meant to achieve does the perception of their actual work no end of harm.
I have been told several times not to say anything about my work: the clear assumption being that a work is meant to "speak for itself". 
But as we all approach any work of art, even our own, with various frames of reference already in place, the work never ever actually speaks for itself anyway: I have been called a minimalist so many times that it's clear to me that instead of engaging with artworks on their own terms so many of us instead cloak our perception with categories like "isms" to the extent that what is not at all "minimalist" about my work gets overlooked.
For me the writing of texts, about my own or other artist's works, is a way of making space for the works to present themselves: one of my favourite philosophical slogans is the phenomenological principle "to the things themselves". 
What Husserl meant in saying this was that the goal of philosophy was not the production of ideas, concepts or interpretations but the renewal of perception, believing that experience is all there is, that what is is what is or has been given to us here, where we are already. 
Philosophy in the phenomenological tradition is not about what is beyond the world, but is a way of engaging thoughtfully with the world where we are: the goal of philosophical analysis is not to tell us where we are or should be going but instead where we are already, it does not take us someplace else but rather returns us to where we already are.
I enjoy the process of writing, even when I write about other artists I admire (Rothko, Klein, Marden, Pollock, Judd, Holbein, Vermeer, various 17th century Dutch still-life painters, Innes, Roeth, Martin or Flavin) I am writing about my own work and the directions I want to take.
For me the "artist statement" is literally part of the work, the work would not be what it was without what is for me a necessary detour through writing.
For me writing has the same processes and formal necessities as painting and similar decisions are always at play: my love of the colon, the parenthesis, the fragmentary statement, the allusive, my love of what I would like to call a layered, ambivalent and tentative form of writing, which reproduces as clearly as possible the way thoughts form, which avoids making declarations as much as possible, all this has clear parallels to the directions my visual work has taken.
My writing frames and informs the processes of painting.I often take notes whilst waiting for a surface to settle, dry or set. 
Writing is a way of experimenting with a work. 
Most artists who write about their work would not admit, as I am about to, that I write as a way of inaugurating, on my terms as it were, initially at least, the terms of a dialogue with the viewer. Every viewer will automatically come to the work with some sort of framework of perception in place. Writing is a way of intervening in an existing framework of interpretation to provide an alternative way of approaching the work. 
Writing can be a way of entering into a conversation with a work in its long and often meandering coming-to-be (or, more accurately, its taking place) as if it were not mine, as if I were simply the observer of this event.
This blog is a way of publishing those observations. In some ways they add up to an extensive "artist statement". 
No scent of coercion here.

Welcome!

     Welcome to a blog presenting texts and images relating to my exhibition, "(T)HERE", opening on 10th November 2009 at The Lane Gallery, 33 Victoria Street East, Auckland, New Zealand. Images from the opening will be posted later but for now what I want to post is a selection of fragments from the writings I make after every session in the studio together with some images of current works or works in progress.