ur-paint bloc

Like a solar eclipse corona.

 

Nocturnal Thamesmead

 

Transition Through Suburban Concrete, 63 x 55cms.

 

Twilight Canopy, 108x 125cms

 

Corona, 42 x 30cms.

Phoenix arts open project 2010

A field of Concrete Ephemeral Dreams

For some time my work has explored ideas of movement and semi controlled painting by using household paint, and domestic materials such as coaxial cable to explore the edges of abstraction, figuration and the art object.

I am currently revisiting the estate that I grew up in and I have started to develop paintings from this. I see Thamesmead as the setting of an urban portal to distil poetic images from my social background and formative experiences.

In the work I attempt to explore haptic and optic visualities embodied in art objects that form a hypostatic union, invoking a sort of dream or subconscious language based on these experiences.

SOME THOUGHTS BEHIND AN EXPLORATION IN ART

Paths to mars hill, 2009, Oil and household paint on board. 80 x 97cm.

'Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature imperceptible, Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of a moving body or the development of a form.’

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A thousand Plateaus; Capitalism & Schizophrenia

Last summer I found some technical drawings I made at school on plotting a helix. The next day, at work, I visited a house of an Open University teacher who was studying the double helix, which is to do with the basic building blocks of DNA. This spurred me on to start incorporating these drawings into my paintings, and also to find out the further potential for metaphor, in my work which can be found in the molecular world.

The introduction of these helix forms into my work have begun to serve as a way of breaking up the processes I have been using, which mainly involves pouring dulux paint across the picture plane, they have also helped as a way of introducing pictorial elements into my paintings.

The pouring element of the painting is, in a way, seminal to subsequent, or simultaneous elements of my painting strategy.

In pouring/spreading the paint, through using gravity, the movement in the first instance spreads until it has reached a level of perception I am satisfied with, yet once static an impression of movement still somehow remains, though at different speeds this relationship helps in touching on an important dynamic concerning my work.

Movements essential relationship to the imperceptible (both being by nature imperceptible) is an important metaphor in terms of seeing God through art because if we are talking about an infinite entity outside, we might say, the circumference of our finite perception, then we will be looking at God in the displacement of a moving body, or the development of a form.

We might say that in the many acts found in my work some preservations of the wake of myself- inspired by phenomenal encounters through culture and nature in which I see the wake of God - may be found. The displacement of moving body and development of form in my work, then, is the deposit of such experience in my work.

Numinous; 1 indicating the presence of a divinity 2 spiritual. (Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition),

In attempting to look at the dynamic I am trying to articulate in my work, I think it would be helpful in looking at a way in which a numinous encounter may be localised in something such as a piece of art. In doing so the following observation by Dallas Willard might serve as a starting point:

‘ I am a spiritual being who currently has a physical body. I occupy my body and its environs by my consciousness of it and by my capacity to will and to act with and through it. I occupy my body and its proximate space, but I am not localizable in it or around it. You cannot find me or any of my thoughts, feelings, or character traits in any part of my body. Even I cannot. If you wish to find me, the last thing you should do is open my body to take a look - or even examine it closely with a microscope or other physical instruments....’ ‘....Now, roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localised in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit. In the incarnation he focused his reality in a special way in the body of Jesus. This was so that we might be ‘ enlightened by the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6).’

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy; Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God, p. 86/87 ( Fount, 1998)