Reflecting on work for my forthcoming exhibition at Green Gallery this autumn, I see how far I have come on my artist’s journey and realise that this body of work will represent only a fragment of that journey. For my artistic practice is no easy commute, it’s more a series of long haul flights and winding land crossings where I don’t get to know the final destination and can barely recall who I was when I first set off.
This body of work - where I’m at right now - will no doubt appear serene and collected on the surface, but underpinning it all is the continuing bumpy ride of the artist’s struggle. In my studio adventure, through even the setbacks, I bring to light what I find down the sunless rabbit holes of imagination (complete with gnarled roots reaching out) as I travel down them. This is the crucible that gives the work its earthy edge.
To say an exhibition can only represent a ‘snapshot’ is a fairly unfamiliar concept to me, because I’ve always thought I’m pretty solid in the work I make. I draw, I paint, I explore and evolve as an artist and a person. However, in recent years, and particularly in the last year creating the new work for this exhibition, I feel that I have shed so many skins as an artist, metaphorically speaking. I’ve had so many ideas, and had to let go of many of them for now, as I realise how long it takes to truly explore something. Good ideas deserve their own space and ultimately an exhibition is stronger when it focuses on less.
I’ve had many dark nights of the soul, where I sometimes thought that things I wanted to achieve were simply beyond my capabilities, or were irrelevant, or maybe even had been done before. And sometimes I was forgetting I can bring my own unique voice to something, because I’ve forgotten to believe in myself, I have asked myself in despair ‘why bother?’
This has sometimes felt like the black moment in many a novel plot, where everything seems lost and the heroine is going to succumb to the forces of evil - but then the rainbow beams out hope - and possibility. I pick myself off the floor and push through, continue and resolve. Hours of work can be lost - this is painful, and yet there’s catharsis in the autonomy that comes with taking the decision to let it go, to paint over, to start again.
When I manifest more powerful work, it then feels like those depths of despair were a temporary place I had to go to in order to achieve greater things, and it was worth it, and I’m stronger and more prepared for when I’ll be travelling there again. The dark night of the soul is often described as ‘the death of the old self and the birth of the new self’. That’s pretty close to my shedding skin analogy.
And so to the new work - months of careful self-reflection has gone into what I’ve created. Working with a subject matter I’m passionate about, that of weathered and decayed victorian tombstones and crypts, from their moss and lichen-covered shapes and looming presence, down to worn away inscriptions and faded memorial portraits.
Transience, mixed media on canvas, 32” x 44”
It’s become all consuming - day and night working to achieve resolution, to eventually realise rich, textured surfaces focussing on these themes of peeling decay, layer on layer as a vision of time’s passing - it takes massive energy and self-belief to realise deep, flowing work that meshes together.
To go beyond these initial images into a purely abstract form has intrigued me, so, in exploring abstract simplicity, I’ve taken the bold step of producing some large-scale work. This has been a real psychological journey from the earlier corvid monotypes, feral cats and sketches where I was studying shapes quite closely: the urns, angel wings, overall shapes - vertical dynamic lines, reaching for the heavens - some tombstones and crypts having little buttress motifs, which I re-imagine in my own way, as giving them the impression of creatures in their own right. In my artist’s eye these massive slabs start walking like stone phantoms in the night!
The larger works have taken on a form of abstract landscapes in their own right, where rained-on and pitted textures of rust, moss and verdigris fight for supremacy on slabs of remembrance, weathered by nature. They are intense, haunting textural statements about where I’m at as an artist and the visceral, physical process of paint that goes into my mark-making to create this kind of turmoil / memento mori.
Edged Out Rust, Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 44”
I’ve also created a suite of monotypes; monochromatic paintings exploring the corvids, birds who are generally associated as visitors to cemetery gardens. I like to refer to them as the ‘guardians of the stones’, and along with some scraggy cemetery cats, my creature creations are decked out in their own mourning regalia. These make fitting companions for the faded, stained portraits, embedded in some tombstones, these being poignant motifs which I’ve also referenced. These trigger the imagination - who were they, what did they dream of? I wonder if, in a sense, they are all of us, as no matter how hard man tries to leave behind a memorial, every surface will see a a battle between the weathering of nature and the structural integrity of that surface. Eventually nature will win and take with it all traces of multiple generations.
And so, I ask myself, as history may be re written, can we honour by monument alone? People live on in the memories of the loved ones they leave behind, so when nature has done its work and what remains are unrecognisable, crumbling pieces, sinking back into the earth, the mother of us all… is this a reminder that ultimately the past is lost? Maybe not, for within the devouring by nature there is always rebirth. And hopefully human beings will always live in a world where they can make - and love - art.
New work will preview at Green Gallery on the 15th of September 2024, 2-5pm
Green Gallery. The Coachhouse, Baron Court, Stirling. FK8 3NX
Tel: 01360 850180
Somnolence, monotype on fabriano paper, 9.5” x 13.5”