“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
Mark Rothko

I have explored and experimented with all sorts of media over the decades (e.g. drawing and painting, linocut and silkscreen, etching and photography, earthwork and figurative sculpture).   However, all of these processes and techniques can – most especially if the user becomes ’too’ proficient in their practice – ensnare and enslave the creative imagination; and this by the very tool or skill the individual so industriously sought to master.    I am well acquainted with these snares and traps and have not been immune from their seductiveness myself, sometimes spending years trying to free myself from this or that ‘comfortable [some might say ‘successful’] medium.’ …

Painting Heroes: Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani.

Sculptural Heroes: Robert Smithson, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Cornelia Parker, Antonio Canova, and Michaelangelo’s ‘prisoners’.

… So much for the physical actions and materials employed in Art-making, but what of ‘Purpose’ and/or ‘Meaning’?  

We all need a place to stand, and for me, as a creative individual and aesthetician, the two pillars that front my creative endeavours are Beauty and Truth.   Highfaluting concepts and essentially unattainable, I know – ‘Perfection itself’, as some say ‘being its own flaw’ – but with the shallow measures of fame and fortune never having constituted snares or traps for me, why shouldn’t I have aimed high? …

Re: Amsterdam MERZ – (1977)

– a small mixed media collage (See Gallery)

As an Art Student in Newcastle, in 1977, I undertook a ‘Field Trip’ to Amsterdam.   A fan, both of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and El Lissitzky (1890-1941) at the time (and since), I made this drawing on my return.

For me its simplicity is its charm.   What do you think?

… My work, in all its incarnations, and across more than half a century, has involved ‘getting my hands dirty’ in the messy dialogue between Order and Chaos, while searching for those ever-elusive-butterflies-on-the-horizon, Beauty and Truth. …

Old Favourites or Fallen Painterly Heroes (who I love a little less than I once did): Gustav Klimt, Barnett Newman, Michaelangelo Caravaggio, Wassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky.

Old Favourites or Fallen Sculptural Heroes (who I love a little less than I once did): Auguste Rodin.

… Even the thematic complications of the ceramic figurative sculptures of the mid-1990’s – 2000’s, are, in my view, ‘reaching’ for Beauty and Truth, not ‘despite’ their being burdened by an identity, but precisely because they have an identity.      

I hope the viewer will, in examining and excavating the work(s), find ample evidence of the Order-Chaos struggle.   Beyond that, if the viewer can find something in any of my work that they regard as, even in some small way, Beautiful or True, for them, then I will be well contented.

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Gently, Brother, gently, pray!

 – a commentary on this two-piece sculpture (See Gallery)

For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day,

I watch’d the Potter thumping his Wet Clay:

And with its all-obliterated Tongue

It murmur’d “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

(From ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’).

‘Nuff’ said about this particular two-piece sculpture, don’t you think?

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“What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.”

Constantin Brancusi (on form and essence)

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Cheers!