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.
Painting is a time-based process which mirrors the time-based experience of being human. Painting also reaches back through historical time, in the same way that painting carries our experience of existence into the future. I mean directly and bodily.
At the end of Being and Time, Heidegger suggests that Time manifests itself as the horizon of Being. In The Origin of The Work of Art, Heidegger says that The Work of Art has its own Being.
Painting is not primarily a theoretical or an intellectual discourse, it is a bodily meditation on Being. That is, it is physical and sensual by its very Nature. This original nature existed long before Thought.
The origin of painting, and the history of painting, are completely tied to the human body; the body is the key to what painting IS. At the beginning, painting was on the body. Painting on the body is deeper, more spiritual and more experiential than modern people understand. The painting on canvas is a painting on a transferred “body” (the body of the painting). Not only is painting made on the body, it is also made by the body (the artist’s body). All this relates to what Heidegger said about The Work Of Art having its own Being.
Looking at the late paintings of Titian, the viewer apprehends a sense of touch. That is, the viewer experiences the artist’s touch upon the things being represented. This is an example of the direct transmission of bodily experience through painting.
To give a further example: paintings and sculptures of the human body from classical antiquity still have Being right now, in the present. They were imbued with transmitted bodily energy two thousand years ago, they still carry this weight and energy now.
My new paintings are focused on bodily energy, and on sensual forms and surfaces. To this end, I am working intensely every week with models, but I have no interest in representation of the model or the body. My aim is to transmit bodily energy and emotions directly into pure absolute paintings. My work with the model is to clarify this intention.
The immediate roots of Abstract painting are located in the paintings and sculptures of 19th century Northern Symbolists. Their work was centred on study of the nude. 20th century Abstract painting maintains and renews the historical relationship between painting and the human body.
A painting is its own body. The Symbolists believed that this body clothes the spirit which burns within. As an abstract painter, and as a mystic, I believe that the inner fire of a painting is in fact indistinguishable from its outer form. The Being of the painting is close at hand, always within sight, but we need to open our eyes to see it.