A Bit About Me…
An interview in Eight Questions.
The product of a milliner, ganger, boatman, florist, inspector-of-the-night-mail, gunner, messenger-boy, servant, clerk-to-the-works, carpenter and platelayer, I’m less an artist and more a bricoleur, a ‘bringer-together’, forever re-assembling bits of my bit of the world.
1. Why do you make paintings?
To be honest I think my ‘creative thing’ began not with painting but in childhood with simply getting outdoors; with making things (puppets, tree-houses & dens, a vegetable patch…) and with an awful lot of reading. I enjoyed history, nature writing & detective fiction – anything that might hold my flickering, skittish attention for more than a moment or two.
Painting arrived later and became a kind of route map out of teenage confusion about what direction my life might take – I was quite sure I was going to be a landscape gardener – for a while. But then, I read Picasso’s quote that “a painting is just another way of keeping a diary”. I found that hugely interesting, that it might be possible to record your experience of life through something a sensual and tactile as paint. Increasingly painting (or the ‘art act’) came to define my way forward.
It took me a while to learn to be more comfortable with the fact that every work I make is part of a process of learning, an artifact marking a point on my journey. The paintings are always incomplete; a palimpsest of parts of my metaphorical, associative and ultimately fragmentary life story. It’s that sense of incompleteness that drives me to go on looking and making.
I see painting as a by-product of a discourse with memory. It’s an interweaving of autobiography, imagination, story-telling, reportage, place research and intuition – a tactile means of bringing things together…
2. Could you explain your process?
I like to paint every day – even if it is only for half an hour.
My process tends to be a time-consuming, hesitant, ungainly affair, involving play, risk and mess. There’s a constant battle against the nagging, wheedling voice of my severe inner critic.
I tend to paint on wooden panels. I find it easier to work on paintings in a loose series, and often have many paintings in progress at any one time, varying in scale from intimate to large-ish. The works emerge from the physical process of painting to the degree that, at the start, I can’t see (indeed have no wish to see) the end-image. Wiping-out, painting-over, erasing, turning the painting around, blotting, masking, scrubbing, scraping and scratching all play a part. I shift from one piece to another and try not to focus on completion, but rather on nudging each painting from one place (the here & now…) to another place (way over there…).
Paintings take on a final form only slowly. I try to give them sufficient room to develop meaning, they’re sometimes not touched for weeks, months even. I like to think of this pause as a settling or incubation period, with time given over to contemplation and clarifying where the image might want to go. I feel that paintings should, at the last, achieve full autonomy from me and take on an independent life of their own.
3. How would you describe your work?
A workshop? A playroom? A bog!
Hopefully, they’re a good few steps away from the kind of pictorial representation seen in traditional landscape painting.
To my mind, when my paintings work it is because, in some ambiguous and hard to explain way, they succeed in expressing, in pictorial form ideas exploring belonging, longing, loss, place and identity.
In the best of them they even achieve a degree of synthesis between, on the one hand colour-form and, on the other, a raft of other interests that include, in no particular order: inland boating; photography; genealogy; folklore; vernacular architecture; old maps; ‘The Matlocks’ (a collection of small towns along the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire); industrial heritage—particularly day boats and English Midland canals; myth & memory; modernist poetry and psychogeography.
4. What creative achievements or breakthroughs have stood out in the last year…
After a decades-long wandering off into psycho-geography, documentary and poetry I have, in recent years, undergone an exciting ‘return’ to painting. It began as a therapeutic process, a few hours of pattern making with glossy enamel paint, all ‘roses & castles’ and geometric designs. Initially I had no intention of taking painting any further than that. I felt grateful that painting was there, to support me during a difficult time, however what actually happened was both surprising and really rewarding. Painting stuck around; and became an essential part of the fabric of my life. I’m producing a lot of work, and generally I’m happy with the direction the work is taking…
5. What limiting beliefs do you carry. What stories do you tell yourself that are perhaps holding you back?
So very many! They include:
I’m too old for a fresh start…
I don’t have the emotional resilience or headspace to make art professionally or full-time…
I missed the ‘painting boat’ thirty-plus years ago…
I’m not a good enough artist…
The work I make isn’t worth a second glance…
I’m risk-averse and self-critical to succeed as an artist in my ’final third’…
I’m reclusive, a hermit, increasingly tongue-tied and prefer to be hidden away painting than promoting myself as an artist…
I’m, first-and-foremost, a provider who must always generate a regular income to ensure my family’s future security…
Concern that I’m not getting Vitamin B (ie. Vitamin Boat!) and really missing ‘inlanding’ (ie. the art of canal boating) because I spend an increasing amount of time indoor painting.
Over time I’ve learned what’s important to me is solitude and its places, a few ‘thin’ objects and life’s loves…
6. If you could envision your perfect life, what it would look like, feel like and be like…
Ah, a perfect life would pivot around a happy family. And good health. And after that, well… perhaps I’m actually closing in on my envisaged INTENTIONAL future… The restoration and re-purposing of the boat has begun, as has my evolving lifestyle project. Think ‘tiny home/studio’. Think Vlogs from Our Eileen. Think Back Deck, Back Cabin, Head, Bunk Room & workshop, Galley, Long Room (Studio) and Front or ‘Summer’ Deck. Fields and water and trees and space, open countryside on my doorstep. Time to produce artwork etc. etc.
An ideal day would likely be solitary and mostly outdoors, but then there’d be walking the Whiplington(s) after a productive morning painting and thinking excitedly, optimistically about an upcoming show… At times I’d be enjoying a productive breather, such as moving the boat or some restoration project, furniture making, a Roses & Castles can painting etc. Art, with life & craft united; and later, wine or a pub pint talking/thinking next steps; a BBQ, star-gazing and/or chatting late into the night with new/old friends… I’d be living…modestly, contentedly, creatively, savouring the solitude and those I love will be doing OK… I’d be free of the burden of anxiety; feeling as if I belong and that I have worth. That change is fine and creative risk-taking is necessary and worthwhile. The art I am making is personal, perhaps challenging, hopefully enjoyed, valued, collected. Ah, dreams…. dreams…. I’m on a journey towards my dreams…
7. What academic training has supported your work?
I had a pretty traditional formal academic education. It began with an inspiring teacher at secondary school who believed I had potential; followed by a foundation course at Chesterfield College of Art & Design (1981) and then studying Fine Art, first at Coventry Polytechnic and then Sheffield Polytechnic where I complete a first degree in Painting & Printmaking in 1985; eschewing becoming a full-time artist, I took an art teacher qualification at Brighton Polytechnic and later studied for an MA at the Polytechnic of North London which focused on theoretical practice around Representation & Modernity.
However, much more important to my development as a painter has been direct life experience – love and friendships, walking, boating, being out in the landscape, uncovering my family roots and stories, and delving into place over a lifetime.
8. Who’d be included on your inspiration list?
So very many heroes!!! Whilst I’ve always been seduced by abstraction, with its seductive focus on markmaking, on paint handling, on invention and, most importantly, on the freedoms that come from dispensing with the representational, I do tend towards those painters who reference the world around them; the modern Australian landscape painters are a huge inspiration, Idris Murphy, Catherine Cassidy and Ross Laurie for example; and then, perhaps counter-intuitively there’s Rose Wylie and Tal R and further back there’s the delicious lyricism of Ivon Hitchens… I could go on and on…
I’ve so many painter heroes… yet, for me, it’s never been just about image makers. In my desire to delve beneath the superficial integrity of the surface of place I’ve read… read… read. Martin Shaw, Alan Garner, George Perec, Phil Smith, Nick Papadimitriou, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Tim Dee, Rob Cowen, Rebecca Solnit, Richard Skelton, Geoff Nicholson, Iain Sinclair, W. G. Sebald, Peter Ackroyd, William Least Heat-Moon, Dexter Petley, Chris Packham, Helen Macdonald et al, and on through the novels of Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin, Graham Swift, John Berger, John Burnside and David Pearce to the diaries of Derek Jarman and the poetry of R.F. Langley, Richard Caddel, Ken Smith, Sean Borodale, Maurice Scully, Jacob Polley, Peter Riley, Roy Fisher, R.S. Thomas, Tomas Tranströmer, Ted Hughes, David Jones, Basil Bunting and so on…
The list is ever changing and always growing… And, although this list mainly references contemporary creators, there could easily be another list (and then another) of historic heroes and makers too!
Creativity is to do with seeking a means of cherishing fleeting moments of life and sharing those experiences with others. We’re the sum of our stories and defined by their telling & re-telling.