Paintwork

The painting is a process of making and unmaking, of finding something (a memory impression) and loosing it, of erasure and repetition. Each time, with the last painting and with the next, one returns to reveal (to re-present) what has been submerged or forgotten. The urge to create something is coupled with a counter-veiling urge - to negate, obliterate, and start over.

In search of what?

Paintwork-2008.jpg

What comes into focus one minute dissolves in the next. The target continually shifts because at the heart of the image is a search for, a recapitulation of, the uncertain ground of the self. The process contains a tension between open-ended exploration (impulsive and playful) and the need for resolution ( that is, to rationalize the process, to withdraw from disorder into what is once more familiar and recognizable), so bringing it to completion.  Of course, this ending, this recovery, is always provisional, always open to new beginnings, and to other possible representations. Just as in this picture, where beneath the surface is another, now lost.  Yet something vestigial remains (the ghost of a memory or a dream) in the process of erasure, suggesting a possible return to the image by another route.

Painting is a continuum of moments, one in which it is not the subject matter which counts but the trace of a presence, and the process by which it is represented.  The purpose is not to render the visible, but to render visible, as Paul Klee said. It is a search for what cannot be found (or which remains continually elusive). It is as though the real painting remains elsewhere – the dilemma being that to find it would not only terminate this painting but the need to paint itself.