These paintings made from mixed-media; acrylic, gel medium transfer, Indian ink, silver-point and oil paint on wood panels, have been built on in successive layers over time. They have lain dormant for several years whilst I worked on other things. Now they are finally resolved (or abandoned?) as I am unable to add or subtract anything from them. Although they look like real collage, the process whereby they were constructed, they are, in fact, all trompe l'oeil painting made from direct observation of paper fragments, and nothing is actually glued to the surface. Pictures inside pictures confuse and compound appearance and reality.
What does this 'work' consist of ?
Dog-eared fragments torn from long abandoned art history books, faded photographs and the half obscured after image of words of poetry transferred from the printed page, jostle for space against ink stains, delicate trees sketches, a butterfly, a feather. Clouds drift by in the corner of paintings, torn fragments gleaned from the corner of auction catalogue pages. Lost identities, broken statues and half remembered pasts congeal into dried and brittle pages that were once vehicles for desire, art, memory, imagination, Are these journeys into an imagined elsewhere, windows into the soul, or clues to an unsolved mystery? The jumbled contents of a long forgotten drawer gather into a dusty corner of the mind like silent witnesses to something hovering intangibly at the edge of recall, stubbornly remaining unremembered, unsaid.....
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