In the Shadow of the Waxwing Slain

Most of the inspiration for my drawings and paintings come from an aleatoric collection of old black and white photographs.  Some aerial shots of industrial towns  and also pictures that my father took.  Decades ago in Northern Ireland, where I was born. 

 
The aura of these old photographs, in a way, to celebrate my formative years sharing my father’s fascination for dangerous places.  Our visits to coastlines, shipyard docks and the numerous building sites of reconstruction Britain.  These were places inhabited by giants made of basalt columns and rusting steel, groaning on mooring lines,  sections of oil tankers looming high above the smoke shrouded Sunday morning row houses that surrounded the shipyards of my native Belfast.  The stillness that provaded my early sensibilities was gleaned from those wanderings around the silenced shipyards  and building sites and stirred in me a lifelong fascination of long wintery shadows cast by gantry cranes and scaffolding.  An examination of my past, not with nostalgia but a close investigation of how imagination saw, shape, form and scale.  It was when I was introduced to the early black and white films of Michelangelo Antonioni, in particular the ‘Eclipse’ with it’s high contrast shots of construction sites, their palpable stillness caught in that momentary beat between frenetic work and rest. 

A successful painting is one that provides a place to rest.  When there is the slightest hint of a moment of perfection,  the slightest presence, and the work comes to life.

I never edit or change my paintings once I know they are finished, it would be counter productive to disturb that collection of moments of perfection that make up a sensibility.  Cropping of the photographs in the initial stage of inspiration provides the intelligence and essence of the work.  I focus on what constitutes a strong composition, for it is composition not color that makes a successful work of art.  The paintings and drawings are realized by the use of tone and composition that is what attributes to my reduced palette and strong reliance on stereometric space.  I still use the old method of modeling space using a series of warms and cools.  In former days space was created for the “action” in the work.  I strive to create space itself as the “action”.

Photographs replace and alter memories but it is the very transubstantiation and aura that provides the inner dialectic that happens in the mind during the formation of the work that is so compelling.  Something that is aesthetically valid yet independent of meaning, content dissolved so completely into form that it cannot be reduced to anything not itself.  I don’t believe in influence or the eclectic, just recurrence.  That is why I paint from the same photograph over and over and over.  Paintings that re-stimulate inspirations and re-awaken sensibilities, that it’s function.