The Making of Art

Painting always comes back to portraiture for me. It’s a portrait of a person, a mood, a place, a sequence of events, a view of the world. Most of my paintings of people are friends or people I have met. Some are archival photographs with the kind of compelling presence that I can’t get away from, so I paint them for the joy of it and reinvent their context, time, their age or gender. 

I collaborate with the model, usually a friend, by asking them to create the images along with me, inventing poses, and presenting their presence to the camera and the canvas. Then once we have the source images, I take full ownership, changing any element that seems to ask for it. Some paintings take forever and some take just a few days. Commissioned work provides the framework that drives all the rest, giving momentum through collaborative effort and human interaction. I want the viewer to meet the subject, and to feel like there’s a real relationship backwards in time from the moment of the sitting, and forward in time, for the subject to anticipate the human viewers going on through the generations. Every portrait is a full personality. This is a person you get to know, who witnesses your life as you pass. They pass comment on your internal monologue every time you see the artwork

I’ll paint the same thing so many times. Sometimes Identical but at different scales or in new media, sometimes I’ll reinvent the same image so that it’s impossible to tell they are related. 

Anyway. I mostly worked in acrylic and oil on canvas for the last decade. They are the most controllable. Oil more than acrylic, but that depends on the ambient temperature and humidity. Watercolour gives me a completely different style, simply by virtue of the medium moving itself around on the paper. So much is uncontrolled, merely anticipated, if I’m lucky, as I paint. When the paint dries, it does so where physics and gravity dictate, not where I originally laid my brush. The best I can hope to do is predict the paint, understand the paper and hope gravity, temperature and ambient humidity will play along

Sculpture is something that has always just emerged whenever my hands are left idle near enough malleable material. Sometimes they’re dreams made real, mostly they’re ideas that describe themselves as they come into being. It’s never a struggle and I rarely use any reference material. The process of making a mould is always complex though. I’ve tried to let other people make moulds for me but after painful, expensive and deadline-costing disasters, I now do it all myself and teach others to do it too, either online or in person

Usually I’ll play an audiobook or history podcast while I work. I find long, rambling tomes that take me to a different time or place allow my hands to work independently of my noisy brain. I think also, that once you’re used to a certain type of work, it becomes a reliable, automatic movement. The muscle memory doing what conscious thought used to.