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Actual size: 100 x 122cm

Influenced by Greek bronzes, antique friezes with erosions caused by time and by images of samurai and horsemen from literature, a threatening, blood-tinted warrior is partly erased by my iconoclastic method of fading, layering and melting the image.

I am a figurative painter with an interest in images which morph into abstraction. I have a background in literary studies and much of my work uses poetry and drama as a springboard for painting. These works often involve figures in the wilderness or on journeys through exacting places: figures made vulnerable not just by the extreme settings but by my method of painting which seeks to attack or challenge their identity or solidity.

These selected paintings are based on literature (by Marlowe and Shakespeare) and on images of samurai and they all feature the warrior or rider.

This horseman is to some extent an image of energy, freedom and speed. However, this is only part of the story. Pain and defeat are predictably the other sides of the coin and I represent both joy and violence through my ‘iconoclastic’ method of working. 

By extending or covering the rider with veils, blooms or blizzards of paint it’s as if he is taken up into clouds of bliss. But the same technique can suggest the opposite. He is taken apart both by conflict and by my method of painting which defaces, deconstructs and scars him.

I undo the representational image with the materials used to create it. The painting is a process of making and unmaking. But then this leads to remaking since the realistic image mutates into something else as materials modify it.

The materials of paint, water, pastels and charcoal are therefore important to me in a particular way since the spot or stain or blot or line which invades or escapes or attacks the image contrasts with what is controlled, predictable and recognisable.

Floating beside or impertinently overriding a human figure, it suggests the presence of the nonhuman, unnameable, unconscious or unseen: cells, bodily processes or something hovering outside language or consciousness. The liberty I give to my materials, therefore, opens out the familiar into the unfamiliar and enigmatic territory.