One Man Show - Derby Museum & Art Gallery - 2002

Shaving Air Five, 2001 Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 221 x 181 cms

Lets move onto the main body of paintings here the 'Shaving Air' series.   How did these paintings come about?

The 'Shaving Air' group come from two places - one actual and one 'formal'.   Most of the work in the painting exhibition is arrived at in that way.  

The actual is the far western peninsula of Cornwall.   This coast means a great deal to me.   I studied in Falmouth so much of my formative experience as an artist comes from that time...although back then (1970) I was pretty scornful of the idea of working from, let alone of, the landscape.   In any event until relatively recently I had been working well away from Cornwall and work over the previous decade drew upon sources such as regular visits to Italy or one-off trips to places like Archangelsk in the far north of Russia.   Going back to Cornwall three years ago, specifically to the small fishing village of Porthleven it became very clear to me that I needed to make a body of work drawing upon this source.   And specifically, because this is the way I think of my pictures, of moments, conjunctions of my own thoughts, feelings with these moments and the place and the conditions - atmospheric, emotional and so on.

On the 'formal' level I determined that the particular visit would be an opportunity to open up the colour palette in my paintings.   Immediately prior to the Porthleven trip (January 1999)   I had reduced the palette in my work and restricted the ground to white.   For me it was time to open it up again and Cornwall struck me as a very good place to do it.   The two works made on that trip put colour firmly back into play but at the expense of a more complex structure (Porthleven Six & Six In Porthleven).   But alongside the paintings I make books and one of those made during that visit has stimulated the 'Shaving Air' series where a broader colour palette is used in quite complicated compositions.

Is there a deliberate intention to move towards more descriptive visual elements, water on a beach, for example?

Not especially so.

But there are devices - even images - that might well be read that way.

Perhaps. I don't mind that anymore than other readings which people have that I don't recognise.   However this is not part of the work for me.   The pictures should work first as paintings, second as emotional states and finally perhaps to express a sense of time and place...but this will rarely be particular or specific in the image to the viewer so a depiction of a coastline or rock or whatever would be quite misleading.

You rarely make entirely constructed or wholly deliberate marks in the pictures insofar as, although the paint is controlled loosely, it is allowed to find its own path.

As a young student I was taught to look after and be careful with brushes!   I'm not sure that I've interpreted that in the way it was meant...but I have always taken it as something of a nostrum.

Guitar Man In Lucca, 1999 Acrylic on Canvas 170 x 240 cms