Context

If I were to situate my practice within an historical context, I would link it primarily to abstract expressionism. While I consider myself to be a postmodern artist I am not looking back at abstract expressionism / modernism with the cynical or ironic lens which the term often implies.

My work is not a reaction against but an open dialogue with its techniques, practices and principles. I am still producing non-representational work but doing so by using the format of repeatable ‘all-over’ surface patterns. I see this as a logical development to continue the abstract expressionist experiment. I think the link between abstract expressionism and surface pattern can be seen in this statement by Clement Greenberg. 

“ The eye has trouble locating central emphases and is more directly compelled to treat the whole of the surface as a single undifferentiated field of interest, and this, in turn, compels us to feel and judge the picture more immediately in terms of its over-all unity” (Greenberg, 1989, p.137).

Like the abstract expressionists, my inspiration comes from within; colours, marks and gestures speak of my internal response to the external world. In his seminal text The Sublime Is Now, Barnet Newman asserted that:


“Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation.”  (Newman,1998, p574).