Most of us, I suppose, enjoy looking at images – still or moving – and there will be elements within those that draw us in more powerfully than others, figurative or abstract. We might be pulled in by the way a painter depicts a sweep of landscape or the way a photographer has captured a feeling betrayed by someone’s eyes or for thousands of different reasons.
Initially the content, or ‘subject’ of that image may be what holds our attention for a short while, perhaps long enough to make us go closer and look a little harder. From this point onwards we might go on to marvel at a particularly strong colour, or maybe a spectacular combination of them, or be transfixed by a sublime network of lines, black and stark against a white background, outlining an interesting shape or implying form. Alternatively, it might be the combination of dramatic tones, lights with darks that fire our imaginations and forces us to gaze harder still? Each of these elements can elicit strong feelings in the beholder. I too love these elements when I see someone using them well to express a visual idea. However, missing from that list is the visual element of surface texture – real and implied – and it is this that has become the main obsession in my work.
Visual Element Of Surface Texture
It happened quite by accident. My early work was all about colour and tone, and I wasn’t particularly confident exploring either due to a propensity to indulge myself with too much of both. Keeping faith with landscape as a genre, I began to limit colour and concentrate more upon the plastic qualities of oil paint in expressing ideas about trees in forests other than by colour. I was therefore thinking more about representing hardness of bark, the suggested bulk of tree trunks, the sharp edges of branches or the weight of the ground the trees were growing out of.
This process was entirely experimental and new. I began to discover what happens when you keep on adding layers of thick paint as a paste and never scrape it off. I started to understand the hardening skin of a drying paint surface and the differing effects one can achieve when working, variously, over a newly dried surface: one that had been drying for a few weeks or one drying over a period of months. I began to see how oil paint can crack and when this can be a virtue for an effect or a phenomenon to avoid at all costs. The longer and deeper I went with this I began to sense something I had not anticipated: multiple layers of oil paint began to express something unique unto themselves. Irrespective of what my ‘subject’ for a painting might be (landscape, still life or whatever) the subject of my experimental work was simply ‘paint’, and certain facets of what it can do.