Control(s)
10th Street Studio
West Virginia, USA, 2022
This initiative emerged from a sustained questioning of painting’s necessity: not its technical procedures, to which I remain deeply committed, but its justificatory framework, what, in contemporary conditions, warrants the act of painting at all. My difficulty lay in subject matter. Like many painters before me, I found representational motifs increasingly prosaic. Barnett Newman’s observation that the later twentieth century might be characterised as “the search for something to paint” resonated profoundly. In response, I returned to landscape, more precisely, to pseudo-landscape, as a provisional scaffold. These works functioned as landscapes of the mind, shaped by isolation and memory. They provided a structure upon which paint could operate, yet their primary content was experiential rather than topographical.
10th Street Studio
West Virginia, USA, 2022
This initiative emerged from a sustained questioning of painting’s necessity: not its technical procedures, to which I remain deeply committed, but its justificatory framework, what, in contemporary conditions, warrants the act of painting at all. My difficulty lay in subject matter. Like many painters before me, I found representational motifs increasingly prosaic. Barnett Newman’s observation that the later twentieth century might be characterised as “the search for something to paint” resonated profoundly. In response, I returned to landscape, more precisely, to pseudo-landscape, as a provisional scaffold. These works functioned as landscapes of the mind, shaped by isolation and memory. They provided a structure upon which paint could operate, yet their primary content was experiential rather than topographical.
Upon returning to my studio in the United States in late 2021, I resumed work on my Americana project, employing impasto oils and heightened colour influenced by the light of West Virginia. Yet despite the visual potency of the imagery, it began to feel secondary. I recognised that the success of the work depended not upon depiction but upon the authority of the brushstroke itself. Seeking to intensify its presence, I reduced the scale of my supports to small, unprimed wooden panels. In the act of priming them with thick white gesso, I encountered an unexpected clarity. The contrast between luminous white strokes and raw wood foregrounded gesture in its most elemental form, unmediated by image or colour. In that moment, painting was stripped to its essentials: surface, movement, material, and touch.
This realisation marked a decisive shift. The brushstroke ceased to serve an image and instead became the subject in its own right. The work affirmed that painting’s relevance need not be secured through external narrative or motif, but through an intensified engagement with its intrinsic properties. Finding a Reason to Paint thus evolved from a conceptual inquiry into a material conviction. In rediscovering the sincerity and immediacy of the mark, I re-established painting not as illustration, but as event—an act in which meaning arises directly from the encounter between hand, surface, and time.