I took the figure as subject from art history, that is it’s origin for me.  It wasn’t a figure I had seen in real life, it was from paintings I saw in galleries and from the pages of art books.  Where to situation my figures was much more difficult point to establish.

I wanted to isolate the figure and see it as an object by itself without political and post structuralist gender based perspectives.  I did a B.A majoring in Women’s Studies and that was very focused on the gaze and identity and was guided by the thought of people like Foucault, Derrida and Freud.  It loaded up the body with so much strife and angst it felt heavy and weighed down by it’s own endless cycle of self reflection and definition.  I had become tired with thinking about the gaze and power structures.  I wondered if the body could be unencumbered and free.  Instead of being a container of constant re-evaluation could it be a place of truth unto itself?  Where the person can have a much reduced external awareness and an expanded interior awareness, a state of euphoria.

I come from an aesthetic approach, I’m interested in the beautiful.  Each time I would get a new favourite figurative artist the thing I would always feel most drawn to was its beauty.  There has been such a significant movement away from beauty, if you think about the works of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, they presented very jarring depictions of the human form.  I was more interested when the body was presented as tender, delicate and pleasurable such as early Netherlandish painting.  I’m interested in the singular truth of how beautiful form is.  That it is harmonious and radiant, that was the thing I was chasing through my love of the figure through art history.

I am also interested in what beauty can do, it’s purpose.  I’m guided by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s movement from the beautiful, to the good and then the true.  And I like this because I think as humans we are always arrested by beauty, I feel like it’s the first thing people feel attracted to about my work. I didn’t want my work to be threatening, or have an overbearing message or to be shocking or ironic, I want people to be able to approach it themselves, in their own time.  I wanted it to be earnest and sincere about what I was depicting.  And my pursuit here is to ever deeper perspectives of the beautiful and I’m not talking about beauty now in the physical sense.

At the beginning I made my backgrounds similar to that which were used in the academic studios, a plain wash of burnt umber, roughly prepared to take the focused study of the body.  This did allow me time to focus and perfect the way I paint the body, it provided dedicated time and attention to achieving a result where the body was delicate and nuanced.  But then I found I wanted to increase the harmony between the background and the figure.  For the backgrounds to be as light and airy as the subject, for the figures to seamlessly blend into the background.  Then I conceived of the idea that the figure could be floating on a horizon line.  Not where the earth meets the sky but where the sea meets the sky.

I was influenced by Plotinus.  He theorised that the soul is on the boarder between the physical and intelligible realms.  The soul is torn between two possibilities.  It’s on the horizon of the bodily and the intelligible. This was where I wanted the internal state of the model to be and I wanted that to be reflected in the form and light, glowing, subtle and transparent.  I was particularly inspired by the light and atmosphere where the ocean meets the sea, how the play of light can be colourful and will often entirely distort the line into a mist.  I thought that would be the ideal place to locate the figure, in that in-between stage of being neither here nor there.

Having a rigorous and regimented process to making my paintings I think is core to both getting the paintings correct and progressing the work forward to make progress both conceptually and technically.  There isn’t much room for anything casual or loose, my core values in painting would be restraint and discipline and that applies to both my work ethic and the paintings themselves, there has to always be a sense I’m holding back.

I work with traditional oil paints.  Initially, I started painting with water colours, because I had done a water colour class.  But I wanted to move to oil because of their texture, I liked how thick and creamy they were, almost structural.  Water colour glides about in an unpredictable way and you need to be quick and move with it.  The water is really the driver and the brush stops it going in the wrong direction, like you are trying to corral the paint.  There is nothing quick about my paintings.  With oils you build up, they don’t move on their own.  I liked how they seemed natural, primal and archival, they aren’t synthetic.

I like to take my time with the subject, there is a lot of very slow looking, attempting to get every nuanced curve and tonal change.  I want to commit to a respectful and dutiful transcribing of what I see.  The figure doesn’t have any flat planes on it so you can’t cover large area with one colour the closer up you go and the slower you can get all those tiny movements of form.  My eyes have become very attuned to distinguishing microscope tonal changes across the form.  My first degree was a medical one so I do have a fairly good understanding of anatomy and where all the muscles lie, but it’s mostly careful, dedicated looking which enables me to get curves right, that has been something that has built up over the years.  I go in close and try and pick up the tiniest of tonal alteration, the slower you go the better it gets.  It’s best to disregard time when painting like that, perhaps even dedicating an entire week to the smallest of areas and not moving off until every fraction of a millimetre has been noticed.  That process is contrary both to life in general and your desire to just get the painting finished, it’s about committing to staying in one spot and just persistent looking and concentrating until you can’t see anything else to transcribe, until everything has been noticed.

I consciously try to keep my range of tones narrow and on the light side, I want the result to be translucent, gentle and light.  In other words I don’t have deep shadows.  I do this to keep the paintings light both literally and to convey feeling.  I think shadows add drama and ground figures.   I’m not trying to make the figures flat as I want them to still have form but to remain delicate.  After all in a sense the figure is floating in an atmosphere of water molecules not sitting or standing on the ground.

In terms of where I would like the work to go in the future I am always striving to reduce and streamline.  The work will always be about the figure first and foremost, but I want to control that figure, reduce complexity. I want to distract the viewer from it’s individuality, my figures are not portraits of individuals.