One Man Show - Centro de Arte de S. Joao da Madeira, Portugal - 2005

The banks are made of marble

With a guard at every door

And the vaults are stuffed with silver

That the miners sweated for

I wandered around this country

From shore to shining shore

It really made me wonder

The things I heard and saw.

But the banks are made of marble

With a guard at every door

And the vaults are stuffed with silver

That the miners sweated for.

The Banks of Marble
Lyrics by Les Rice

My origins as an artist emerged from a sense of expanded artistic possibilities borne in the nineteen sixties. In two successive years I was dumbfounded by new art from America; in 1978 Frank Stella’s black series expanded my idea of what a painting could be; in 1979 Richard Tuttle exploded my idea of what a painting might be. But I remained wedded to the image then and to this day. The opportunity to show in a completely new context is always joyful, and it creates a fresh chance to look over a body of work and make new connections and meanings in it.

On this occasion I have plundered the past decade of drawings, or perhaps more accurately paintings on paper; and for the first time in a decade chosen some photographs to accompany them. The drawn line is mostly something special; how that line is arrived at is sometimes less so. In most of these pictures the line is made by allowing the material, paint, to meander across the surface of the support, paper. In fewer cases the material is dragged or directed in pre-determined ways, according to plans arrived at some time in advance of their making.

Imagery, where it exists, is the product of ruminations around a location. In that sense most of the pictures on show are, in one way or another, landscapes. On another level they are nothing of the sort. Assembled after the event; from the sensations of place; mediated by how one felt at the time; who one was with; the sounds, smells, textures, etc; then filtered through the mediums and the moments in the studio during the process of making, they are just what they are; paintings and/or drawings. I hope that most of the pictures can speak in a completely non-verbal way of the places that inspired their making: the verdant richness of a Tuscan garden in summer is a very different place to the winter quayside in the Irish city of Cork.

These works on paper sit alongside my practice as a painter of larger canvases. The works share some similarities although they are also different in many respects. At their best the various ways of working set up a dialogue – an easy conversation – that sends ideas and forms back and forward; the individual pieces though, have their own place in the world.

A particular fascination with how man made or natural pigments can be manipulated or left to serendipity, to create lines and formal compositions in many different and surprising ways, informs the way in which making pictures has evolved over many years of practice.
The modest selection of photographs has been taken over the years in locations from Russia, on one side of the new Europe, to Portugal on the other:

Most of the places are shorelines. I grew up near the coast but my adult life has been spent in the landlocked midlands of England; so the shoreline continues to fascinate, intrigue and beguile me. Among the artists I admire there is debate about the place of nature in art with opinions divided as to its validity as subject matter. Photography’s claim to be the dominant medium in contemporary visual art, and ‘the pencil of nature’, has weakened under the limitless possibilities offered by digitisation and the constituent ambiguities it creates for both painter and photographer.

I have chosen the title (un) Shore lines because it surely - or unsurely, perhaps - indicates both my interests and intentions in making so much of the art I have made over the past thirty years.

Portraits for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 2002

A Meeting in the woods near Tilburg 1 - 4, 2003

Stigmata 1 -3, 2001