Frances In Ecstasy Painting

This is one of a group of eight 3ft x 4ft paintings on heavy watercolour paper glued onto birch plywood panels. The painting is built up in layersof process like a game of concequences and begin with the chance action of spattered red wine. I developed this technique of using red wine as the ground to kick start the painting, spoiling the surface with a seemingly violent act of self-sabotage and creating a problem for me to fix. It also functions as a wry joke, a short cut to making religious paintings. The effect is really interesting, producing subtle textures and chromatographic colours and over time the wine fades giving the paintings a life-span. Once this is dry, the game of painterly consequences is played out in response, and references to classical painting emerge alongside disparate elements of half remembered art history and popular culture. Recurring motifs reccur like the drooping balloon-like ear/phallus, Bacon-esque faces, expressionist spatters and flat graphic colours, as though collaged together from other images. There are common themes with past work. I return to a particular experience of time as layered up in an artwork, the artist able to communicate across time, collaborating with different versions of themselves, like Beckett’s Krapp talking to his old tape recordings, or Burroughs’ cut-up experiments and how he described them as like time travel. I’m also fascinated by how mistakes are repeated, amplified or integrated: a slip in jazz improvisation, a memetic affect of language entering the dictionary, a genetic anomaly becoming an evolutionary adaptation. I often return to Russell Hoban's Punch and Judy show in his novel Ridley Walker. My influences as a painter still stem from my teenaged fascination with Frances Bacon, his figurative abstraction and the intensity of his colour. Clearly Picasso’s lineage is important, as is George Condo’s “Psychological Cubism”. Phillip Guston is a liberating figure for contemporary painters too and I’m particularly drawn to his “Poor Richard” political cartoons. I love the humanity of Haim Soutine’s awkward portraits of chefs and bellboys and at the same time the otherworldly masked characters of James Endsor. Further back Rembrandt is a key figure, both in terms of his glazed/layered technique and his approach to depicting prophets and saints with deep humanity and even quizzical humour. His late obsession with the prophet Paul in particular is informing my most recent work. And finally, a defining influence on my return to painting is the American animator, director and now painter Ralph Bakshi who is now in his 80s and painting in New Mexico. I have written an article for Felix H Wilkinson website on his 1992 film “Cool World” (). The characters I paint wrestle with themselves, uncomfortably torn between figuration and abstraction. Contradictions of fast-slow, heavy-light, funny-grotesque are captured at some point between collapse and alignment, caught in transition. They may be mascots of the complex, fragile and confusing world we inhabit today or prophets of what may come after.