| PAINTING WITH OILS |
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I try to paint what I see. I take hundreds of photographs and pick one, or two. The photograph pins a moment and I return to it again and again, sometimes for over a year or more, sometimes with a magnifying glass, and I find many gestures where it seemed there was only one at first. When it works the piece seems to hover, and the present is held and widened potentially for ages. I like to imagine the eyes that will rest here hundreds of years from now. I am widening the present. I used to direct plays and I was a student of method acting. When I work without an image, I go where the paint takes me. In fact I do that even when there is an image guiding me. When I make diligent preparations and I am free in the moment, I find I have painted what I feel and in some ways what I think. I try to bring all my life experience to the decisions in the painting. I am patient and alert, waiting for the accidents that will give it life. I moved to Crooked Brook almost fifteen years ago. I came here not so much to get away from it all as to slow it down so I could get a better look at it. I like to work with the place itself, with the house and the junk lying around and the rocks and the brook and the people. Many methods all organised by one place. I think of the place as a machine for collecting the accidents which make up the works of art. The question,"Where am I?" is my preoccupation. It is the dreamer's question. I wake up every day, even every moment when things are going right, and ask "Where am I?" But I don't feel quite so lost as I once did.
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