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.
Painting is centred on materiality, which means paint, and on drawing, which is transmission of the energy of the human body. At the beginning, painting was on the body. Painting on the body is deeper and more spiritually engaged than modern people are able to comprehend. A painting on canvas is a painting on a transferred “body” (the body of the painting). Furthermore, painting is made by the body (the artist’s body).
Although all painting is bodily, historically most painters have forgotten this and have proceeded on a false or tenuous basis: that it’s possible to express human thought through painting. The best way to express thought is through words. Painting is something different, painting expresses itself. That is, painting expresses its own Being, not exactly Human Being, but painting does use the energy of being human to bring itself into Being.
Titian was the first artist to focus on the materiality and Being of paint itself and on the actual processes of painting. In such a practice, painting is its own necessity and its own end. In mid life, Titian’s interest shifted away from the language of storytelling, which is the everyday language of human experience, and increasingly engaged with the experience and meaning of painting as painting. For these reasons and others, Titian’s paintings are unrivalled for sensuality and beauty of colour, for spiritual intensity, and for transmitted energy of the body.
Four hundred years later, in the 1950s, Jackson Pollock and Kazuo Shiraga worked independently on a related project: direct expression of bodily energy in painting without reference to thought. This is the key moment in twentieth century painting. Many well known painters, in France, Germany and China for example, have continued to work in related ways since then. At its weakest, the work of these followers is theatrical; nothing has attained to the same purity and intensity as the best paintings of Pollock and Shiraga.
For fifty years I have been solely interested in making abstract paintings. I devoted thirty years to questions of materiality in painting. This took form as a systematic study of art history, and as extensive research into the history of materials and painting techniques. I experimented with everything I learnt and discovered, this is the work that I exhibited. Early on, I understood many levels relating to materiality; it took me much longer to begin to understand the relationship of painting to energy and the human body.
At the end of 2002, when I was still focused on materiality, I went to China for the first time. On that visit, I went to see the ancient paintings at the Mogao Caves, in the Western desert, near the Dunhuang oasis. The painting of Daoist deities on the ceiling of Cave 249 (Western Wei Dynasty circa 550 AD) had a profound and transformative effect on my practice. After this, I was redirected to engage with Daoist understanding of flow of energy (Qi), and to consider more carefully the place of drawing, energy and body in painting.
Although I have never been interested in representation of the model or of the body, I have always, ever since I was at art school, made drawings from the body of a model. I started making paintings on the body twenty five years ago, after my experience at the Mogao Caves. However, it is only since about 2020 that I have had sufficient experience, skill and understanding to be able to develop a serious and integrated approach to working directly with the body in painting.
For three years, from 2023 to 2025, I worked with studio assistant Rio Rosano. Having help from someone much younger enabled me to develop work which is totally centred on bodily energy. This is the work presented here. Large paintings made on unstretched linen using the whole body instead of the brush are included, as are stretched canvases painted with the hands, and photographs of paintings made directly onto Rio’s body. Drawings are exhibited too, including six very large drawings on paper which were made collaboratively with Rio.