I generally prefer to feel slightly out of my depth when painting. I personally believe ‘art’ shouldn’t be a place to play it safe. I prefer for it to feel like a fight rather than something peaceful.
I dip in and out of ‘portraiture’ and find that my more abstract work inevitably informs my portrait practice and simultaneously/organically pushes it in more challenging directions. It all speaks to each other in one way or another. I guess it’s lineage. They all exist as one body. I don’t enjoy sticking to one approach/discipline and just tend to go wherever the moment wants me to. Each day has its own perspective. I like allowing the moment to decide where the day goes. My consequential ambition as a painter is to be able to make just one or two marks on a canvas (or any surface) and for it to obvious who made it. Which is probably the primary reason as to why I have a slight problem with the ‘requirement’ of signing a work (although I do still currently sign most of my work for the time being). The mark making fulfils that role wholeheartedly, in my opinion – and is the reason I decided, for the first time to-date, to sign this painting with just a fingerprint.
