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.
