MY PROCESS, MY PROGRESS
"You are incomplete. I am incomplete. We look to complete ourselves and other things. That’s why forms that are incomplete are alluring. They are beautiful when the completion we give then is both surprising and “right”. It seems, even if briefly, to have always been. It is, if good, a microcosm of the way our intellect, emotions and will are constantly forming and reforming the world. I want to make paintings that are always forming and reforming themselves."
John Beardman
By being there in whatever vagaries are happening at the time, I put myself wholeheartedly in this time and Lo! the result is timelessness. Only by being as much myself as I can, can I connect with you. And even then communication is such a wobbly thing, for just as I have to make sense of my input according to a lot of learned responses, so does everyone else.
My forms are vaguely referential to every-day objects, flowers, oceans, puddles, trees. Only a suggestion that what we see is not what we see. Our minds insist on metaphors.
Painting on a fresh canvas or an older piece in a sense is the same. I am immediately drawn into and changing the world in front of me. Be it a shape or color of the older work, or a crease in the surface, texture, or smell of the new canvas. My impulse becomes an action. The action is new, but mistake it not, it’s conditioned by millions of past actions, both mine and everyone elses. Back to the monkey who extends his hand when the banana reaches a certain lemon gold.
Painting is for me a hanging net to catch, or sieve, time. making that sweet jam of timelessness from a very specific time. Not only is the time specific, the process is intimately tied to my immediate life. There are no tricks, the techniques are immediate and are chosen impulsively. Yet that is not to say that it’s random. The weather plays a part. If it’s misty the paint makes a lovely scrim. Then the mist turns to rain, and the scrim becomes an angry looking run. With a downpour, the paint is completely removed.
The past is present. Each painting displays its creation.The scars of a little girl’s fall is seen on the knees of the woman. The process of finding out what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Say a fold in the canvas suggests a form, as it’s painted in, the shape waves at you, but just barely, like the Queen.
I want my audience to be immediately struck by the force of an image, yet to slowly work to digest it.
A natural supernaturalism.