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.
