I try to take an image as close to completion as I can before it becomes something else.
That probably tells you more about how I paint than any label I could put on it.
I don’t work to a fixed plan. I rarely have a complete picture in my head that I’m trying to reproduce. There might be a thought, a feeling, a word, or something I’ve been carrying around without quite knowing why. It gives me somewhere to begin. After that, I have to pay attention.
A mark changes the surface. Another mark changes what the first one means. An image begins to appear, and suddenly the painting has a direction I couldn’t have drawn up beforehand.
I sometimes describe the images as coming through me rather than from me. I’m still the one holding the brush, obviously. There isn’t a small, unpaid painter hiding behind the canvas. But there are moments when the work seems to arrive ahead of my understanding of it.
My job is to recognise what is happening and stay with it.
That can be difficult. Once something starts to work, there’s a temptation to tidy it up, explain it, or make it behave. Sometimes the next mark helps. Sometimes it takes away the very thing that made the image interesting.
There’s a point where you have to decide whether you’re bringing the work closer to itself or simply adding more paint.
Completion, for me, isn’t necessarily the moment everything is resolved. A painting can feel complete and still contain questions. A line can remain awkward. A thought can stop halfway through. Those things can belong.
What I’m looking for is the point where the image holds together strongly enough to stand on its own.
And I try to recognise that point before it slips past and turns into the next painting.
It’s an unusual way to work, perhaps. There’s uncertainty in it. There are wrong turns. There are days when the canvas appears to have considerably less idea of what’s going on than I do.
But a fixed plan would take away the part I’m most interested in: discovering something I didn’t know I was going to make.