'Fallen Leaves', oil on canvas, 20 x 25cms, 2024
Following on from my last post about my exhibition, ‘Like A Song With No End’ at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, here is the press release and statement, with some of the smaller paintings that were on display, that I collaborated on with my friend, Amanda Kumariah. This was quite a different exhibition than other solo ones I have presented. The paintings contained a much more diverse range of subject matter, with more personal themes and thoughts held in the work and the observations and experiences that informed it’s gestation. Amanda really helped me express some of this in her editing and shaping of the accompanying statement. Thanks, Amanda...
'Fallen Leaves' (Ben), oil on canvas, 25 x 20cms, 2024
“Like a Song with No End,” presents my first portraits in many years. They depict Jack, Richard and Ben, all men at work as a delivery driver, a social worker on call, and an artist respectively. In these portraits, I wanted to explore not only the people, but also the spaces where they spend much of their time, endeavouring to reveal the psychological relationships the subjects have with these spaces.
'Fallen Leaves', oil on canvas, 25 x 20cms, 2024
The solitary figure is also to be found in my other paintings set in the landscape, whether they are walking in the woods in winter, on a barge approaching us along the canal in autumn, or zipping along the towpath on an e-scooter, the spring hawthorn an abundant backdrop.
I don’t want to tell people how to look at my work, but painting, like the process of writing this statement, is a push and pull of how much to tell and how to tell it. These paintings contain my thoughts about three generations of men in my own family, including myself, and their personal journeys. Despite the immediacy of my subject matter, its themes are far-reaching. These landscape paintings hold for me experiences of aimlessness, uncertainty, belonging and solitude. The solitary figures in my work are journeying through life, with destination unknown, and feelings of being off-centre or out of place prevail beneath even the sunnier landscapes.
'There Is A World', oil on canvas, 120 x 180cms, 2022-24
I want the exhibition to contain many different threads to pick up and pull. I see so many exhibitions where an artist’s work is neatly wrapped up in some sort of conceptual package, but I don’t work like that. I want the work to feel more authentic to my everyday experiences and thinking, which is someone messy and chaotic and does not fit into a box. I think you, the audience, might understand that, because perhaps your lives are like that too.
The paintings attempt to place themselves in the present, but with a line of connection to previous artists, whose influences ebb and flow into the work across many centuries, including the paintings of Giotto and the early Florentine artists, Eastern Painting traditions and even the cave paintings of Lascaux. In the end, I don’t view my paintings as figurative or abstract. When thinking about them, I am often reminded of a quote from the painter Richard Diebenkorn, who stated, “Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense, every artist is abstract, for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.”
'Winter Morning', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2021
Painting is as much an expression of the painter as it is of the world around them. We almost cannot “help” bringing ourselves into our work, in more surprising ways that we realise. There are hidden meanings which I consciously work into my paintings, but when I step back, I notice recurring themes subconsciously expressed too.
I have held many exhibitions of my paintings over the years, and I always enjoy putting collections of different ones together. Much like life itself, my paintings evolve naturally from one thing to the next, like a song with no end. This exhibition celebrates the repetition and beauty of the song we are in, as artists and as human beings, a beautiful song with no end.
