About the key principles behind his work

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“I don’t spend much time thinking about the themes, they emerge intuitively. (…) What is undeniably changing is my approach to the painting itself. In some series I am allowing the abstract to come to the fore, and maybe a little bit more freedom in the painterly attack. I’m also interested in introducing new techniques, whether it be different oil mediums or spray painting. It’s been important to bring back the playful elements, the sheer enjoyment of smearing colour around. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves why we became painters in the first place.”

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About his creative process

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“I use an old version of photoshop to build digital collages as ideas for my paintings. I mainly use the cut and paste functions and tend to ignore all the rest as they are superfluous, and all the interesting stuff happens later with the actual painting. Before I had a computer, I made real paper collages from sources as varied as shopping catalogues, recipe books and my own photographs. Now I mine the internet and my own archive – I have shelves in my studio with old books from charity shops, second hand coffee table books with subjects as diverse as table decoration, home interiors, Swiss chalets, mountain tourist brochures and orthopedic surgery.

 

I scan in a page or two, slice them up digitally and manipulate these elements until I hit upon an idea I can work with. I like to keep this stage quite free and spontaneous. It’s part image choreography and part 2D model building.

I’ll generally spend a day roughing out these ideas on the computer and then make a few prints of them. These are my references, my image maps. I pin them next to my canvas and use them as if painting from observation. As the canvas develops and my ideas evolve, I make and print out more collages.

 

At a later stage I might photograph the painting and feed this back into the collage. When new images are painted onto the canvas, previous elements are often adjusted, covered over, scuffed up, defaced or renewed. The result usually means that there’s a fair bit of archaeology in there and sometimes, if I end up rejecting the painting, it serves as the initial layer for a new work.”

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About the use of new technologies

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“It all comes down to the talent of the artist if any work is lucky enough to become interesting. But I do worry that the tech is just so incredibly beguiling. It is so bloody easy to build an image now. You could spend a lifetime staring at the screen and never make another painting. Why bother? I have found myself making digital collages that are thrilling and very seductive – which I’d love to paint, but I know that the paint will not behave like the pixels. For a painting to succeed, it must exist separately from that digital catalyst, to exist in its own discreet world.”

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About his urge of not depicting faces

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“I have made many small paintings with faces. When it comes to my large pictures, I do feel a great urge to hide the face, to anonymize. I have often wondered why I do this. I think this is to do with the huge distraction a portrait creates – a massive interruption to the larger idea in the picture. Put in a face and the viewer’s gaze jumps straight to it, to the detriment of everything else. I think that my figures are ciphers, they are inhabitants of a world larger than their own particular story. I think they are representatives or surrogates for the theme rather than being the theme themselves. And the unspecified figure allows the viewer to occupy the painting either as protagonist or prey.”

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About why he became a painter

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“I love the way a painting is incontrovertibly connected to the character and physicality of the painter. I love the way a painting holds every mark made, the record of its making, the journey. It is a record of the artists presence. It exists outside the artists intentions.”