Things happen slowly in here. I sometimes wish that were different, but I've come to enjoy - and more importantly allow - the slow game. A work which evolves over years through careful consideration appeals to me more than an image easily won. To me a studio ought to be part sanctuary, part workshop, part shrine. The objects I surround myself with here are premises, memories, palimpsests of my life, yet I don't consider it paradoxical to state that I ultimately judge a work of mine successful to the extent I have managed to excise myself from it.
Imagination interests me less than memory, less than the forms of memory, less than versions of truth. Why do certain figures move us? Is it not because they invoke (through gesture, through expression) something specific and otherwise unreachable? Objects matter, and the conjunction of objects - how they play on memory - is intensely personal. But this is not in itself art - it is a fact of life which some people may struggle to see, although the desire for order and association remains strong.
The artist, like a shaman, helps others see, feel, and make sense of their lives. To give as the artist gives is my aspiration. The image is made and re-made. In the same work, and across works, the figure is approached as it is defined and defined as it is approached.
This is how I like to work, and from many years of looking I am in little doubt that a painting gives nothing up to the casual glance; the true nature and worth of a painting only emerges through lengthy contemplation. The retinal image is only one layer of truth and of feeling. To invoke a memory and then make it sing for others is poetry.
Tracing the figure, versioning the figure, drawing the figure, being the figure. Ultimately one is trying to come back into the world.
There is a saying I have chalked up onto my studio wall: 'Festina lente'. It means 'hurry slowly' and I first came across it in an essay by Italo Calvino. I think it sums up for me the essential lesson I have learnt over the last decade, which is to recognise and heed the temporal. In the same way that a draughtsman has to make a line at a certain speed (not too fast, not too slow) a painting will dictate the speed at which it must be made, and which the artist must honour.
