Writing
My interest as a painter is in the origin of painting, in the history and development of techniques and forms, and in the unbroken historical continuity of painting as bodily practice. Painting is not primarily a theoretical or an intellectual discourse, it is primarily a bodily meditation on Being. That is, it is physical and sensual by its very Nature. This original nature existed long before Thought.
My interest as a painter is in the origin of painting in caves, in the history and development of techniques and forms, and in the unbroken historical continuity of painting as a bodily practice.
In the twenty first century, we live within an overwhelmingly complex international web of cultural conceptions and technologies. Our cultural artifacts are mostly electronic. They are noisy, brutal and addictive, designed for instant gratification, and they are ubiquitous; they are also largely based on photography (and variant moving-image derivatives of photography), which means that they consist of disembodied images. This disembodiment reinforces our materialism. As materialists, we do not seek out the work of art, our need is for the product. Unlike the work of art, which embodies physical being in the world, products are representations of ideas, ideas like ‘status’ and ‘power’. We are therefore unable to be present to the beauty (or otherwise) of things in the world, since we have no feeling for “the thingness of things”, only feelings and ideas about what things mean. To dwell in culture such as this, the nature of our own being is more than just hidden, it is entirely unknown to us.
Abstract painting came very late to Australia. Non geometric pure abstraction has been particularly late to develop here. Even now, almost all Australian abstract painters continue to refer to their work in relationship to landscape, light or nature, as if abstract painting is merely a reduction from, or an extension of, a motif from Nature. Such an approach is related to the kind of 19th and 20th century Symbolist practices from which abstraction initially arose, but such practices are quite distinct from those of the abstract painter.