1-28 February 2025
These paintings were completed from 2022 to 2024, as I emerged from the seclusion of the previous few years and began working in a small studio in the Allied Press Building.
A number of these works harken back to earlier years in which my main focus was foreign travel. Chefchaouen (2024) alludes to the city in Morocco with the same name, known sometimes as the “Blue City,” which I visited during my travels in 2016. Hormuz (2023) evokes time that I spent on the Iranian island of Hormuz in 2018, known as the “Rainbow Island.” In contrast, Dialectic of Mud (2024) arises out of, or perhaps more accurately, in sympathy with, the material I used, in particular, fire-scale (or hammer-scale – oxides produced when metal is heated to a high temperature in the course of forging). The title of the painting is a homage to an eponymous book of poems by a long-time friend Richard Reeve. Memory and material (matter) are, thus, two important dimensions of my painting practice.
While creating these works, I am completely engaged with the materials at hand – rust, soot, clay, hammer-scale, chalk, Indian Ink, plaster, charcoal, pigments and media, from oil to acrylic. Once I have finished, however, I realise that there was almost a sort of ghost, a figment of my past, that inhabited the work as I developed it. The results are the paintings now included in this exhibition.
