I've never really engaged in sort of global politics in my work before and I thought well why not, this
might be quite an interesting thing to do I've never collaborated as a painter with
another artist. It soon became apparent that she was going to be dealing with
the kind of story of the extinction and then I'd be dealing with the story of a possible
de-extinction - bringing them back to life - because of my interest in science fiction.
The piece of work that's in the John Moores is an underground infirmary where scientists are
a bit like we're doing with COVID now, and it's quite incredible that it almost
foreshadowed what was about to happen - are desperately trying to bring back Neanderthals
by taking little extracts of DNA from all of us in order to make sure the humanoids survive
beyond the 21st century so I thought that'd be a fantastic macabre piece of work which then Jean
could put into context so when we presented as an exhibition we did a little comic book.
I think I was just drawn to making something from almost nothing, the history behind it,
and just creating something beautiful.
It's my garden mainly that inspires me - and my studio is in the middle of my garden. Mainly I
rely on visual memory and the seasonal changes affect the colour composition and feel of the work.
I guess they are abstracted and I'm interested in abstraction and how the familiar touches abstraction,
and that point. It's not a specific plant or thing - it's quite invented what I paint.
I'm always looking for material, looking for things that tell a story, things that are
going to make potential subjects and you don't even realise that you're looking
- that you know, you find something and it feels like it's come to you and the John
Moores painting was like that because that's part of a series of paintings that I created
from seeing a view on the river Medway of a pillbox. And I've seen these all my life
from when I was a child and I'd walk the dog and suddenly out of nowhere I saw them differently,
because I think the erosion along the river had been so great it was like the
bow of a ship sticking, out you know, all the concrete, the foundations, and suddenly
it was like an event had taken place. Over time this scene had developed and I saw it.
There were two starting places. One was a willow tree that I was asked to prune,
so we cut off all of the branches and it's this experience that made me think
all the time about translation into paint - the sawing, the movement of the branches, the wind -
all of these things become a kind of narrative that I'm developing while I'm thinking 'paint'.
The painting itself is like recall - very very, vivid recall. The other starting point
was the jacket on the blue figure. It's like a builder's jacket which makes it
an object translated into paint that is very much about, sort of, me doing building work or
anybody doing building work. So there's these two things, you know, the person doing labour
and the tree and its fragility, trying to look after it, trying to keep it going.
So I didn't really have, like, the sense of, like, a relationship with the space
or place and I'd only really sort of visited it for, like, maybe minutes -
like, almost like walking through. That was sort of one challenge in a way that I was,
like, how much can I really sort of get from it or, sort of, do I even have, like, the right
to paint this? I mean I've just literally just passed through it. It was a very peaceful place,
I guess, where your mind could, you know, you could really hear sort of tunings as kind of
noise of bird noise or, I don't know, just like footprints. But they sort of provided something
which I love and, like, try to work with in all my paintings, like the sort of sense of, like, an
arena which... or like props that could be used to carry out different kind of tasks.