Girl Sitting 2012

It's been a while since I posted an image of my work despite producing quite a few paintings over the last twelve months. In the third chapter of my MFA dissertation on the notion of fear in the paintings of Peter Doig and Neo Rauch my writing focussed on the materiality of the paint itself. As a figurative painter it's taken me a while to take pleasure in paint as a material, in its manipulation, especially in oil paint as a material. Describing paint I wrote, 'By investigating the artist's methods to evidence on the surface of the canvas "the appearance of something", a phrase Moyra Derby uses in  Illusion and Materiality in Contemporary Painting, I am constantly reminded how the 'physical tricks' of paint can regularly provoke the emotions of the viewer.
As a developing artist, this extra pleasure of paint as well as content is driving my technique as a painter to explore the link between figuration and abstraction.

Just to bring this blog up to date. Today's date is Monday 9th July 2012 and I'm coming to the end of my 2 years Master of Fine Art course. It's gone incredibly quickly and I've been too busy to add a 'painting-a-day' to my workload. This academic year (the second year of the course) involved 3 months writing my dissertation, which was handed in in January, and was all consuming so I did no painting until January. My dissertation title was Fear in the Imagined Landscapes: The aesthetic experience of fear in the landscapes of Peter Doig and Neo Rauch. The work sort to explore notions of isolation and alienation in painted landscapes. As a consequence of this work I feel my painting has developed both in cotent and process. I found the notion of a universal human experience as one of estrangement a fascinating concept and since January I have painted a body of work, approximately 50 small scale paintings and 4 large scale paintings exploring these ideas. At the end of August I will have an opportunity to show a selection of these pieces in the MFA degree show.