As an artist, I feel the spiritual impulse awakens when I start to paint. On a personal level, being adopted, there’s always been a deep insecurity that’s locked into a whole way of being. There’s nothing to relate to, there’s no solid post in the earth that you can tie yourself to. In the end, you’re trying to solve a puzzle that you’ve set yourself and there is no solution. Much of my recent work has been about trying to uncover secrets of genetic codes and how the seed is sown between all of us.
I paint within the realms of abstract expressionism, feeling my work before I produce it. A lot relies on accident and chaos after that thought. Something happens and I spontaneously react to it. My work is spewed out on an emotional level – I’m not a cubist or colourist – I paint an emotion. Elements of my work are related to how musicians like Stockhausen , Debussy and John Cage, work, also Eno and Bowie – sometimes setting rules and dimensions for your output so you don’t get carried away by yourself.
Some of my paintings can look anti-God, when it’s pro-God, really, but on my terms. My images sometimes can become my own deities; I almost have to self-sacrifice and worship my own false idols. They’re images that come from my subliminal mind, my own interstellar arguments with the gods I’ve created in my psyche. There’s a lot of Catholic guilt riddling my work – the price you pay for a Catholic schoolboy upbringing. The `Blood, Vodka and Christ’ painting is a cathartic revenge on God. I was thrashing the demons that pushed so much shite in my head when I was young when I was really looking so much for security and love. Some paintings disturb me now. The paint is imitating a musical nightmare – you don’t know where to go with it. But underneath, I don’t have to be scared, as there’s calm, a progression that’s always been there. When I’m painting, that’s when the deep exorcism comes. I’m trying to get so many demons out. It’s the only way I can get rid of them. There’s no-where else. The themes of decay and inevitable extinction in the universal abyss are a large part of my work. In the past, when I’ve gone into the realms of suicidal despair, the one thing that brings me out is when the work starts to speak back to me. When it works, it’s like a witches’ cauldron. You put everything you can into it and something magic happens that’s beyond any other process. There’s a space that opens up in the moment - it could be an accident or dormant primordial instinct. At this point, the painting metamorphoses from one thing to another. I try to trap this event for as long as I can sustain it as I feel this is the true origin of my symbolic rendering of the human condition. I call it `the transition’.
I’ve tried to paint like the masters, like everyone, because you want to understand what it’s like to paint like that. The terror you face all the time is facing yourself. Without a shadow of a doubt, Francis Bacon has most influenced me as I understand his pain and suffering. But, as he would say himself, it’s not about shock and horror, but a celebration of the awesome universe. It must be for a reason. I couldn’t be so obsessed with the nature of visual imagery if I wasn’t obsessed with the universe, People call my work melancholic or angry, but I’m always trying to paint something majestic that has a purpose for me, that keeps me alive. It helps me keep a check on who I am. I can judge my scale through my work.
I was born in Manchester in 1959. I studied art in Manchester, Blackpool and Leeds, coming to live in Brighton nearly two years ago. I can see my work living in my children and grandchildren’s environments when I’m dead. They’ll have a raw piece of their granddad that’s more real than a photograph could ever be.
