One of your main influences has been Richard Diebenkorn - when did you first see his work?

I visited his retrospective show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1991, although I was familiar with his work for a number of years before then.

What changes of direction came about in your work as a result of seeing that show, and what were you doing before that?

What I was doing was more organic - a lot looser and more automatic. People like Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon were a big influence in the early days. But I had also experimented with much flatter, geometric pieces, which were more constructed. I think what changed with seeing Diebenkorn’s work was the way these two processes could operate together.

Was the layering important?

The layering and the revision - the getting rid of stuff and deconstructing - so as well as putting things in it was also about taking away.

Yes, that two way process, and allowing that process to be seen.

Absolutely - it took away the pressure in the sense that it allowed earlier marks to show through and for one’s tracks to be revealed through the process.

And time, so the process becomes a journey?

That’s right. The process has always been of interest to me. At Leicester I began to get interested in the development and learning that can take place through the work - which is in a way the most important thing. At that time I was also becoming interested in the ideas of G.I.Gurdjieff and the possibility of observing more acutely the relationship between the inner and outer world.

Yes, it’s allowing the inner world to show through the surface.

Before then there was a sense in which one would make a mark and it would present itself as something final, rather than a beginning - to be taken seriously too soon and too self consciously - and also the need to have a good idea to start with.

Rather than mining for it.

Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

Did you come to the grid through seeing Diebenkorn’s work?

No. At the beginning of my second year at Leicester I put myself under a tutor who had a reputation for being tough and challenging with students. He encouraged me to be more self critical and explore other ways of working. I ended up spending a lot of time in the library reading essays on Minimalism and Conceptual Art. I became interested in artists like Agnes Martin and Carl Andre, and I started making my own drawings and sculptures based on the grid. They were very systematic, although what was most interesting was the indeterminacy that was revealed through the structure. My thesis was also about the way such artists used the grid - including Mondrian and Barnett Newman.

So in a way meeting Diebenkorn was the beginning of a way of freeing up the grid, or moving on again?

There was the untethered automatism on the one hand, and then the other extreme of thinking maybe too much about the initial idea and procedures, which became in some ways a straight jacket, and it really took some time after leaving Leicester to begin to find a way of bringing these two together.

It seems to me that the main difference between the work now and the work that was in your first show at Salthouse Gallery is that you’re freer, and in some of them it’s really striking. In ‘Painting with Heart Form’ for example, the structure is very apparent, but so are the processes of change. I like the looped lines and scribbles that look as if you’re making corrections and letting them show, not just rubbing back or building stronger lines, but there are other things going on which are more like graffiti or something more organic, which is really interesting. Does this sort of thing go on beneath the surface of all of your paintings?

In some pieces I use charcoal drawing together with thin grounds, to gradually build up the structure, but in paintings like ‘Painting with Yellow Field’ I have tended to use the loaded brush more directly, working across and saturating the surface, burying whole swathes of the previous statement, but salvaging fragments, which become the basis for something new, something more surprising and more interesting. I do find myself returning to drawing, excluding colour in some pieces, like ‘Piece with Double Loop’, in order to push the mark making and structures further.

I like your colour values too - not just the way you put them down but the sort of colours you use. A lot of them remind me of lichens and verdigris - they have something organic about them.

There are painters that use utilitarian colours to express something more neutral, or something about the industrial world. In my work the colours do have connotations of light, atmosphere and landscape.

So colour is an organic balance to the structure, which is about the construct, the right angle and the ruled line - although there are also the curves coming in, even the way the colour is applied, and the layering, is organic.

That’s all got to do with the process - an emerging from the ground upwards.

Or from the fog that’s gone before, moving towards clarity.

That’s right, because one can create forms or configurations, but in order to move forward they sometimes need to be deconstructed, and in a sense one can associate that with a letting go, like precipitation or melting. In order to go forward something needs to be given up, or transformed in some way.

Another thing that interests me is the amount of work you do on the edge or in the corners, and sometimes there’s a lot of scale variation. Looking at ‘Painting with Yellow Field’ there’s a small cross in a rectangle right up in the left hand corner, and a cross is always a powerful thing that’s going to pull the eye in - but it can also pull it out to the edge. I wonder how much you consciously or subconsciously challenge the edge.

Well, it’s got to be about the whole painting, and I think in a way it’s a dialogue between the part and the whole. In some Chinese paintings you get this relationship between the immense scale of the landscape with its forms and voids, and the figures, which can appear insignificant in comparison. I find this relationship between the incidental and the bigger picture very interesting. I’m getting more interested in this switch of scale. We do this readily on the computer. You can minimise or maximise an image, reduce it, push it into the corner of the screen, save it, bring it back and so on. So what happens if you work on part of a piece, like a postage stamp on an envelope, as an entity in itself - how can that sit in relationship to the bigger picture. Does the reading of the whole thing change the way that incident operates, and vice versa. Because through the layering process one ends up with a myriad of nuances, and new statements and revisions are dependent on the reading of the whole thing - including every incidental mark. For that reason I could never envisage adding a signature as an after-thought.

No, that mystifies me - how an artist can reach a conclusion, and then sign it in a flamboyant way, which immediately unbalances the whole image.

Depending on the kind of work of course. It’s interesting about the signature, because in a strange way it connects with the cross, in that the cross is a way of ‘making your mark’.

Yes, because the diagonal cross seems to be a central element in your work. In ‘Yellow Field’ there is the bigger cross, which is only partly manifest. It’s there but not there.

That’s right. That’s very much what the paintings are about. What fascinates me about the cross is that it marks the spot, very emphatically, but at the same time it says ‘not here’. It can suggest a gateway that blocks the way, but it can also suggest an entrance.

And the rectangle in the corner is approximately the same proportions as the big rectangle of the canvas, so there’s this scale thing. You’ve got a similar thing going on in ‘Drawing with Centre Square’ where you’ve got a central white square acting as an earthing focal point, which is relieved and given a dialogue by a larger, dark space of the same proportions at the top left hand corner. The corner square becomes a place that you start from and return to, and I like that.

In some ways they operate like mandalas - diagrammatic representations of the world - and there’s a kind of simplicity or innocence in our point of departure. Then things have a way of becoming complicated and we spend our lives trying to find our way back, or a way of passing through and moving on. One could easily create a simpler balance in a piece through symmetry, which is what some minimalist painting may be about, and I used to do that, but I am more interested now in points of departure, searching, finding and loosing, through complex balances and movements. I don’t want to deny the whole story - it’s not just about the finished thing.

Not a distillation. What I like is that you’ve got this suggestion of a centre in many of them, but that you also challenge the edge and sometimes totally eradicate the importance of the centre, sometimes suggesting a reading from left to right and top to bottom, like a book.

There are many readings. The paintings have to have a life when I stop. I’m not looking for closure. Through the multiple readings and the open-endedness, when viewing them, you are re-engaging in them, and they offer a number of possibilities. It’s not avoiding resolution - there are motifs and configurations that are arrived at, but they call beyond themselves for completion - even beyond the edge.

It’s avoiding finality - reaching a level of resolution, but leaving it open for the viewer to have a dialogue with the painting.

I’m asking the viewer to become as active in that process as I was in the process of painting, and to search - that’s important - to search for a way in and a way around, and if resolutions are found they are not still, they are not final, but in movement. That may be something that’s difficult to engage with or sit with - we may prefer a simpler kind of resolution.

Because we’re in a hurry. It requires time, which your painting really requires.

Yes. You could say they are very busy - there are many routes through them - but at the end of the day I’ve always felt that a painting, at its most basic level, is like a standing stone - you walk up to it and you meet it - it mirrors you viewing it, and I think in the process of painting, when you’re facing the thing, the still point is the point of reflection or engagement. The centre, is in the painter, or in the viewer, and maybe that’s where the centre of the painting is. It reminds me of the whirling dervishes.

Moving around the still centre - yes, that’s the thing, instead of having a single focal point, there’s the movement, but that still centre still exists.

We find ourselves in a fast moving, fast changing world, and not to be swept along by that, not to be lost in it, but to find a relationship with it, I think is a real challenge.

OCTOBER 2003
SALTHOUSE GALLERY
ST.IVES