Painting

I began making new paintings in spring 2022. I didn’t know where wanted to go with them. I did feel I was consciously forcing the issue – creating a route back into making physical art works after a long period of working digitally. Rediscovering paint, the way it handles and moves on a surface – oh, and how it smells (there was a surprising thrill in breaking open the tubs of Liquitex and inhaling).

I knew I wanted to work at a small scale, and on board. I settled on a small square format (15cm x 15cm), but decided at the outset to work on them as pairs. So the two paintings would be in some sort of dialogue with each other. I think the small, compressed format exerts a visually intensifying effect – and sets up tensions between the two panels.

I kept the palette limited and just experimented with the way the brush, a small decorator’s brush, would carry the paint. Without really consciously thinking about it a pattern of interactions began to form. So, something resembling the eddying of water forms on one panel and might then make a kind of incursion into the opposite, more static – or less turbulent – facing panel. I see them as abstract, but I started making them after we came back from Whitstable, on the Kent coast, where I’d spent a long time watching and photographing the wavelets rippling across the beach at low tide in different lights on different days.