EXHIBITION

Out of the Blue

Abington Philidelphia, USA. 2006

Most of my working life has been spent trying to resolve the necessities of teaching for a living, and being a practising artist. In the last few years I have also been an assessor in various colleges and universities, and for many years a 'sensor' at the Bergen Architectural School in Norway.

I have always found the act and circumstances of teaching to be rewarding, and would probably have wanted to teach even if there had been no need to make a living. Most artists who work in this way will know about the good things in teaching, but will also know about the difficulties of finding a separate and concentrated time for their own practice. When I first started there were many artist/ teachers who developed antennae that kept them and their students in the currency of contemporary art, but I tended to either have the awkward students, or was able to devise mostly group projects that had a rather more social or political basis to them. As a post-graduate student myself after two years military service, I favoured the gritty realities of photography over painting, which made life difficult in the Royal College of those days.

I was born in Liverpool and spent my early years very aware of the presence of the Mersey. I spent many hours watching ships go from right to left, and others go from left to right. I knew what was on the left because not very far away were the great docks, and they were often on fire because it was war time. What was on the right was well beyond my imagination. I was also aware of the sea coming in and receding in a regular way, very different to the scattered and variable movements of the sea lanes. I remember it's sound at night.

Another ( formative? ) experience was at night when the city was bombed. We would go to a converted coal basement. The sky above seemed to me to be like the inside of a huge dark blue dome. Small sounds would slowly move across this vast space. I was able ( or thought I was ) to tell the difference in engine sound between enemy and friendly planes. Every so often something would arrive out of that space and make a big bang, usually in the nearby dock area. On the following morning there was the excitement of collecting warm shrapnel in the streets and on the sands. It was a little like being very small and standing on a coin. You think you know what your world is, and then you realise that there is another world absolutely attached to you but completely opposite. ( Abott's Flatland. The Story of a Square comes to mind.)

Whether the above description has anything to do with the ideas I have as an artist I don't know. I certainly think about them quite a lot. I do generally have an idea of what I want to say though I often find that the original intention has somehow migrated and turned into something else.

With the making of photographs and objects the processes seem to be 'clean' in the sense that certain things have to be attended to before they can exist. In order to proceed, each stage depends on how you did the one before. With painting, however much I try to make it 'clean', there is nearly always a point in which it seems to take on a life of it's own. At this stage I have a bad habit of covering the wall with ideas of what I think it is. I have learned to take notice of a painting that seems to have a truculent and ungiving face, and nurture it. ( probably why i have a fondness for Philip Guston amongst others. ) Though ideas pull in different directions, there is always the struggle for co-herence. I think I would prefer to make work which is just memorable in some way, rather than fit any particular current cannon of art, if there is such a thing.