How would you describe your practice?
I'm primarily a painter, although, that description can be limiting. The practice (it's not really practice), but the verb, painting - has seen me move between painting, sculpture, text and music. Those developments wouldn't have happened, if I hadn't been routed in painting. I think of painting as being liquid thought, it's intrinsically slippery.
Generally, things don't succeed when there's an attempt to pin it down. Moving between mediums allows the opportunity for me to be more succinct when required. And helps the viewer - as people can have prejudices against particular mediums. Sculpture can be the most succinct form - because there's a tangibility to it. I try to think of my paintings as having a physicality about them for this reason.
Where does your source material come from?
I started collecting imagery before the internet was commonplace. Which meant that the static images I was exposed to, were primarily from newspapers and Sunday magazines. It wasn't as descriptive as a google image search so could offer up unforeseen surprises.
More recently, I've been painting my mother and uncle from a photograph of a photograph shot in the mid sixties. It was taken by my grandfather, when they arrived in the UK from Trinidad. The photo is black and white. And my mother and uncle are dressed in these strange, Enid Blyton outfits. However, it is beautifully composed. They stand together and feed a swan. My mothers arm is outstretched in the gesture of a handshake. It has the feel of a photographic negative, where light is inverted. It makes me think of them being transported to somewhere totally alien. Which of course they were. The photo gives me a sense of optimism. As I feel we have a potential to manifest things. I'm tortured by a throw away comment from my year five teacher in art class, who said, "draw what you see, not what you think you see". I'm working through this idea. Where I place them in different encounters. I guess this is about manifestation and the attempt to make things appear, regarding what I want to see. I think this plays a part in what painting can be about.
Discuss the recurring images present in your in your work.
In general terms, children are there, not just to further the species, but also to regulate adult human behaviour. The presence of a child in any ordinary situation is massively beneficial - they help us to become better adults. That was my intention with the earlier work. Where the motif of a child was both emblem and cypher.
The boot is my obsession. I cannot think of any other symbol that is as seductive and as sinister. When I see light reflected from a boot, it reminds me of Caravaggio's Narcissus painting, which I had the pleasure of seeing in Rome. Narcissus's reflection is terror, but the object is heaven. That's a conundrum I often think about.
The importance of materiality in your practice?
Material is of upmost importance. We are still tangible beings. And we know from experience what human touch is capable of communicating. Painting itself, is an activity that is concerned with touch. Within that there are many sub-categories and extensions.
When I first went to the Tate (in those days there was just one in london). I was 16 or 17 and had my first deep experience with art. I noticed dust had collected in thick folds of paint, from the painting I was looking at. I'd never seen painting like that - everything I'd seen before had been in books - where it was flat. It's stayed with me since, this stuff paint, is material before it's an illusion.
The painting was by Karel Appel.
What is the significance of collage in your work?
It's shifted from being a method to a practical philosophy. I read William Burroughs and Brion Gysin for some time. I think collage is an attempt to distort space and time - it's what the cubists knew and I think what some Dadaists would have known too. So it's massively significant to me.
Max Ernst's "A Week of Kindness" has been hugely important. The work tells
me that I can create a rich psychological tableaux from what's around in any given moment. I'm in interested in psychology and perception as an extension of collage. There's something about the collision of particular forms and sensations that can breed new life.
Discuss your use of text and its significance?
It's two things for me. Firstly a reminder. If I'm working quickly, I tend to have words or phrases dropping in and out of my head. And if I'm painting without too much direction, that is to say quickly and intuitively, it can be a good way to nail the image into something.
A word can give shape to things. So there's that side to it, but I also think of letters as being shapes. So an H is like a ladder, an "O" an orifice, "S", snake and so on. So this can offer a dual purpose. Written language is very interesting to me, when it serves pictorial form in this way.
Do you see yourself in your paintings?
To a certain extent yes, inevitably.
Discuss the sentiment of irreverence in your work?
Irreverence feels perfectly natural given the current state of things. The stuff you hear on the radio and TV is insanity normalised. This is nothing new. Yet still, we know who - and the type of thinking that's responsible. So irreverence is a key tool for me and many others clearly. As it runs throughout the varied histories, of pictorial form across the world. My work has been described as having elements of Arte Povera - and that's important to me. The idea that the material links itself to the message. I'm keen to promote that what I do is a verb - it's in the doing. Where the core of the process is transferable, and what is normally seen as waste in the painters studio, I recycle back into the work. I think the materials then become etched with an empathy as a consequence of their indecision and the questioning I force them to undergo.
An artist whose work you currently admire and why?
The painter who taught me and many others on the painting undergraduate at the University of Brighton deserves reappraising, Andrzej Jackowski. Especially in light of the current refugee crisis. His work explores the idea that dream holds legitimate creative possibilities.
As an artist, what's the best advice you've been given?
It's marathon not a race.
