I recently got a call from the publisher of the New York Optimist magazine, John Sebastian, inviting me to do an interview for the mid-October issue, about me, my art and my beliefs. I’m quite shy about the ‘me’ part of the art, but the journey to here is an absolutely essential element of the place where I find myself now, the accumulation of experience, fate, knowledge and life. It was such a great opportunity for me to reflect, attempt to analyse and explain what I’m doing in my studio at the moment. You can read it here!
Re-reading my words later, something else occurred to me about my background that I hadn’t really acknowledged before. Reflecting on some of the recurring themes in my paintings, (factory, mill, land, sea, environment, peril, submergence, sub-terrain), I thought about my grandparents and their lives at the beginning of the 20th century, and what, if anything, the landscape had meant to them.
My paternal grandfather had been a coal miner, working in the coal seams in north east England (and interestingly, before that, a professional boxer, a flyweight fighting out of Birmingham). His appreciation of the landscape will most definitely have differed from mine, but conditions for a life working underground in the pit for most of his life (he died of emphysema) must have been difficult, and frightening, to say the least. The big irony was that he gave up boxing at my grandmother’s behest, in favour of mining, as she feared that fighting for a living was too dangerous.
On the other hand, my maternal grandfather was an eccentric from South Wales, a factory worker, wheeler-dealer, and larger than life character. Unusually, for a manual worker, he had his own style - wearing beautifully cut three-piece suits, with leather braces on his socks, a trilby hat, a walking stick and a gold pocket watch on a chain. Other than that, he had nothing! In fact, both sets of my grandparents were very poorly off financially, and the factory and the mine provided food on the table and a roof overhead, but little else. My grandmothers, on the other hand, were strong and stoical, and both worked as domestic servants and in nursing before motherhood and marriage to my grandfathers.
Why is this relevant? Well I guess it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot to many people, but for me there is a little bit of that struggle within the layers of paint in my work, something of the harsh landscape, an acknowledgement of class struggle, working to make life better somehow, and a conflict (or balance?) between delicate beauty and brutal environment.
I hope you get to read the article in the New York Optimist, and my sincere thanks to John Sebastian for the interesting questions that made me really think!
Private Collection - FACTORY 2021