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Since the early
90s I guess I thought of myself as essentially a ‘realist’, that is to
say someone who responds in an immediate way to observable phenomena.
But in my background lurks a student obsessed with surrealism,
followed by periods in which I worked from imagination as well as working
in collage and mixed media. After I gave up
school teaching I told myself that teaching to ‘A’ level year after
year reflected back into my own work despite my own best efforts, and when
I became freelance my painting definitely became more fluent and less
mannered. However, it has slowly dawned on me that while doing the work, of the last
fifteen years, areas of visual and imaginative thought have been lying dormant. Curiously, this
time it seems that teaching has helped me to see that I was not giving
sufficient space for re-thinking my working practice. Devising practical
workshops and courses on abstract art and having to think closely about
what it means to employ ‘the imagination’ has led to me realise that
playing with the physical properties of things is a rich area of
potential. The ‘idea’ can be very, very simple, the purpose of which
is to make something we haven’t seen before. The qualities for the
artist/observer to engage with are light, scale, weight, colour, presence
and then come the associations - bidden, unbidden, common, random and
remote. So, the following images are a small selection of my most current work that started in October 2006. Click image to enlarge.
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