Things are important.
Things? Ephemeral moments, glimpses that catch your gaze. Mundane
spaces, moments and actions that hold your attention and seem to freeze
time.
I am interested in serendipity –“happy accidents” and the
emotions that come about from noticing them. Familiar examples might be
a water droplet dribbling down the side of a glass,
a speck of dust in a shaft of sunlight or a magnificent sunset over the brow of a hill.
It is not a case of something being beautiful or filled with huge
meaning, sometimes I will respond to something without truthfully
knowing why. For some reason, at one moment of time, a thing has
importance.
This may suggest photography as being a way to go,
but I want to reconstruct the moment that‘s passed. I want to pay
homage to it, actively deconstruct it, then reconstruct it, add myself
to the mix as after all I am the person that had the moment and am
choosing to portray it. Some of the photos I take, if enlarged, would
become seriously uninteresting but by the action of painting, having
made an image out of many marks, it gains a vibrancy, a texture, which
is substantially different to a photograph even if the initial
impression of my work is photographic
As a painter I am unable
to capture these moments immediately and photography can miss them or
lose the emotional connection as it records the event. I use my camera
as a sketchbook, to test , record and then expand on.
I’m not
aiming to glamorise the mundane, but searching to find interest in the
things around us that we usually ignore. There are fascinating things,
often unobserved around each of us. I’m interested in those things that
we miss, that we tend to use 'entertainment' to distract us from. I’m
fascinated by the world around me not in an engaging way, but as an
observer. I love watching the world go by. I am a voyeur.
