Paintings.

Narrative is perfected by retelling to develop new layers of understanding.

Memory works this way—it is only what you choose it to be:

It is truth wrapped up layers of emotion and self-deception:

This is where my art lies.

double click images to view as slides

between noise and silence

All Memory is filtered by subsequent events to the point that others may not recognise the alternate reality that has been created.

By re-telling a story, events are added, distorted and modified to suit both audience and tellers increasing the disparity between reality and a memory of that reality.

These new paintings explore the disparity between what was and what is remembered while exploring the potential for personal reinvention enabled by the silent detachment that comes from displacement.

After the silence develops, what remains are memories, a handful of photographs, music too painful to hear and a future unfettered by a past.

Displaced, detachment and the opportunity of reinvention become real; a canvas to paint over.

Old marks support an invented narrative, modified through reiteration, calcified by use.

Remembering is unwanted, with no focus but modified memory and a stillness that merely shouts of the possibility of better things.

The silence is too loud so you repeat.

Berlin : 2018-2019

These paintngs were based on my memories of Berlin during the late 60’s when, as a child, I would spend summers visiting my German grandparents and have to pass through a series of checkpoints run by the occupying troops, the first to enter East German, the second to enter Berlin.

The Russian checkpoints were always the most difficult to negotiate, setting up the backdrop to weeks of contrasts: blissfulness in an environment of enforced isolation and division, with days spent negotiating the impact of both a divided Germany and the omnipresent effect of the Berlin Wall.

Although the embrace of family and community was strong, these visits were permeated by much that was left unsaid, stories told in a foreign language with much that I didn't want to know, places where access was recently denied.

While listening to radio free berlin, I preferred an imagined reality, a reality based on incomplete memories, and partial truth, achieving a form of reconciliation only by leaving but knowing that I would return.

Using squeegees, stiffened paint brushes and palette knifes for detail, paintings start with a broad field of paint into which signifying marks are made and over which specific details are layered to explore the disparity between what was and what was remembered.

Non-figurative landscape elements that create a notion of place merge with fixed points and specific memories to create a single abstract expression.

Canvas is left unpainted either as vestigial space to allow the subject to breathe or from a belief that what isn't said also has value; the canvas merely records a fleeting moment.

Stripped of figurativeness, some works reflect a single state of being.

They were created in multiple sittings by not thinking about the canvas but giving up to the paint and allowing the paint to find itself.

Some of the series could not be named other than by the use of a single letter.

Man has always made marks: sometimes to assert his position within society , sometimes to reflect the glory of a god, other times to just make a record of an event: These paintings make secular marks to reflect this human need.

Some are very personal whereas others tell stories but all use line as a signifier.