Over the past few years my main activities have been developing ideas for painting, drawing and screenprinting through a great deal of experimentation and research into many disparate but ultimately interlinked subjects, such as musical structures, nuclear and quantum physics, mapping, ecology and disruptive occurrences such as war and natural disaster. 

I am currently working on a range of paintings influenced by both the Large Hadron Collider and particle trails as well as Laniakea, the home of the Milky Way. These represent the smallest and largest manifestations of matter and energy. 

 

An average day at the studio starts with a walk after breakfast. These walks provide a chance to do active meditation and sort out various things in my head and to hopefully achieve clarity. A great way of experiencing nature in all weather conditions and observing seasonal changes and also just good for mental and physical wellbeing in general. 

After the morning's exercise I read emails, do research into whatever I'm busy with at the time and engage in work such as canvas stretching, priming, screenprinting, archiving and photographing artworks or household maintenance. After lunch I might paint for a while, but I find the best time for painting is in the evenings when I'm at my most creative. I worked evening shifts at newspapers as a graphic artist for a great deal of my working life so I got into that working habit. 

   

 

There are several aspects to my art which are drawn from many years of artmaking and experience. These influence my vocabulary or grammar I use in artmaking, it is a visual language comprised of certain subjects and symbols which I have accumulated over time. The challenge is to assemble these into a visual manifestation which somehow can induce a sense of wonder, a reaction, an intensity of focus or meditative process in the viewer. These symbols can be viewed as a shorthand for processes of motion and patterns . 

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Over the last ten years or so I have moved from realism to abstraction. I do still paint realistically on the odd occasion, particularly skies, as they are abstract by their very nature and embody a great deal of what my art is about. The sky paintings fall under an ongoing project I call The Architecture of Air. 

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There is the idea of order and disorder or chaos and the role these factors play in whatever happens on a visible or invisible level or on the micro- and macro- levels. I am particularly interested in the processes behind the never ending cycles of the creation of matter and subsequent decay.  

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There is the everyday visible and experienced aspect of nature. This is informed by what I see around me in the everyday world, such as meditating and working in the garden or going on my daily walks and simply observing the environment. The natural progression towards entropy juxtaposed with attempts to balance delicate systems and their inevitable decay. When I was about 3 or 4 years old I started having several profound peak experiences, almost mystical events while I was playing in the garden, an intense feeling of unity with nature and a feeling of oneness which to this day remain vivid and memorable turning points in my life. 

 

From my experiences of meditating and working in the garden, with cutting branches and various undergrowth, watching the change of seasons, the growth and decay of plants and the random patterns of fallen flowers and foliage on the ground, I found this to be a very appropriate metaphor for life in general. I have created many paintings based on the journey of the life of flowers. This is the inspiration for Memory of Spring. The observation of the way leaves, petals and flowers fall, blown by wind or swept away by rain, forming layers and patterns depending on the contours of the ground. The spring colours in the area of Joburg where I live and work are particularly bright and colourful and form a fascinating colour change as they decay and are reabsorbed into the environment. 

 

The Garden exemplifies the massive, but often unrecognised dependence of the human creative activity upon the co-operation of the natural world … embodying a unity between human beings and the natural world, an intimate co-dependence. - David E Cooper, philosopher. 

 

That Other World and Liminal Space Map are based on the following ideas: 

There is the often unseen scientific aspect, the  abstract aspects modelled by mathematics, chemistry and physics, the making sense of, and the ordering of phenomena taking place on the visible and invisible levels. The energies and the spirit behind the visible phenomena.  

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I have made use of symbols and techniques to portray these unseen aspects. The symbols in my case can range from a speck of dust, random text, broken branches, fallen flowers and leaves and geometric solids to a grid line or a random brushstroke. 

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That Other World is about the space between visible and the invisible, the split seconds of change, chaos and rearrangement of matter. It is about the disruption of the grid. 

There is the paradoxical difficulty of producing something that is completely random and chaotic. Can randomness produce an eventual pattern? Is there such a thing as chaos? It appears that regular patterning is almost a default when rendering a similar object repeatedly such as fallen leaves and natural forest or garden debris and the tracks left by sub-atomic particles. The trick for me is that I have to consciously subvert that tendency by breaking the rhythmic aspect of mark-making. There are musical equivalents at work in my artmaking here; consonance and dissonance, point and counterpoint. The internal rhythms, the breaking down of rhythms, waves and vibrations. Some of my paintings are done under the influence of music, some in complete silence. 

 

Also underpinning my art is the influence of Joseph Campbell and his writings and lectures on mythology. From this I found inspiration from ancient Eastern cosmology and scientific thought represented by mythic imagery, symbolism and ritual. I am also a believer in the power of the subconscious to catalyse imagery and insights. 

 

I make screenprints using monotypes and monoprints as experiments in establishing a vocabulary. I use screenprinting the way other artists use drawing and sketches. Much of the imagery used in my screenprinting is produced by the custom coding of Java in Processing, a generative art program. I also utilise spontaneous hand drawn stencils. This allows me to find unusually random and interesting combinations of visual content and then combined with a process of layering using additional painted elements. These works inform my paintings and drawings. I find this technique suited to my visualisations of particle physics in artworks such as my Large Hadron Collider (LHC) series of artworks. 

 

I am interested in the way grids are utilised and how they function. Ranging from ordering columns of values to map making, engineering and nuclear physics, the grid is often a visible or invisible structure underpinning a sense of order, a shape, a plane or a process. A way to plot trajectories and movements. Grids are used as a basis to illustrate the most profound abstract concepts in mathematics and physics.  

Eventually there is a synthesis or an essence of many ideas in an artwork. When I produce a painting such as those exhibited they are a product of all that is stored in my subconscious and are mostly executed very energetically when starting. The process then assumes a meditative exercise as I attend to the actual detail of the work which can vary a great deal in length of time taken as I often layer paint several times. 

This is particularly pertinent to Liminal Space Map, a painting which is also influenced by viewing drone visuals from the current war between Russia and Ukraine. I often use various interpretations of wartime maps and visuals in my imagery. 

 

Strata is based on the sideways "mapping" of the earth as opposed to the top view to which we are accustomed. Having worked as a news graphic artist in newspapers I was occasionally called upon to do illustrations of cross-sections of mines. I adapted this idea to my painting using a range of my favourite earth colours which has produced a rather pure abstract work. 

 

Among the many artists who have interested me, my current favourites are Pierre Soulange, Fabienne Verdier and Afshin Naghouni.