A HABIT-DEFYING PRACTICE:
marvelling, lingering, perceiving, I paint the ineffable wonder of daily existence interacting with scriptural image and language.
My Painting practice is spiritual: like prayer, its worth is contentious, its pursuit depends on faith and discipline, and its reward is the beauty that draws us out of the world of counterfeit splendour and billboard promises into a spiritual reality. I am inspired by observed physical phenomena and instances where the banal encounters the sacred, and the ordinary heralds the awesome. In the smallest of things, creation interact with the human-made world: a moonlit rectangle on the bathroom floor becomes the holy ground, and the changing season’s light caught on packaging bubbles reminds me that I am beloved. As I recollect my affection and respect for what is specific about a sight or a moment, I manipulate colour and shape and tend their relationships, giving figures to sentiments and understanding on the flat ground. Without relying on the illusion of depth, narrative cues, and the allure of the nameable, I attempt to release physical, spiritual and painterly reality to describe the ineffable. By playing peek-a-boo through forms and colours, I contend with a world that dazzles, rushes, and burns for an alternative coherence, a quiet stillness.
Attention leads to devotion: painting activates the curiosity vital to resisting daily death. Influenced by poetic language and the wonder within the Scripture— my paintings are vignettes of “wow,” “ouch,” “oomph,” and “awooo” moments. They are versions of incomplete translations of gravity-ordained sight, of sentiment tuned to personal memory, and of my complicity in collective consumption; furthermore, they always bear witness to conflict and decay, the consequential conditions we endure as fallen beings. A singular painterly clarity emerges as paint conceals and reveals and as marks are made between drought-like scratches and layered washes. I intuit my reds, yellows, blues, and greys, and analyze the weight of hard-edge and muted shapes, through multiple stages of figuration and disarticulation, what was initially prompted by a slanting view (sunrise cradled within the shadows of touching fingers), an instance's light quality (summer morning in my father’s garden), a spoiled photograph (the back of a boy looking out from the train window), or remains from shared life (a scrap paper strewn with pencil-punctured holes) reaches completion when the painting appears to blush and to be fearless apart from me. In my paintings, the world is found, encountered, and missed, reappearing in pictures evocative of a state caught between flourishing and vanishing.
Since 2015 I have painted on TerraSkin, a degradable paper made from stone. The rigidity of stone paper demands strenuous physical labour in stretching. Unlike traditional canvas or linen, TerraSkin also affords much less control as painting surface— paint application is often destabilized in the brushwork’s push-and-pull, and colours tend to shift from one day to the next. This resistance to control and perceptive stability is characteristic of intellectual and emotional “bright spots” that can pause time, save the day, and teach us how to really look beyond daily distractions and to gain insight into divine mystery. My painting is both meditative and physical— tracing light on fallow, even barren ground, the aim is always to bear life-nourishing fruits. Sometimes the points of reference are obscured, sometimes the pacing seems futile; however, painting, like prayer, is not otherworldly indulgence, but present necessity.