Surface Spotlight
This post offers extra insights into the processes and concept behind my recent work, and the ongoing series Light on Water—much of which can be seen in the virtual exhibition Objet.
Between 2019 and 2022 I worked almost exclusively on a tiny scale, with miniature brushes and intense focus. Before, during and after lockdown—and through three studio moves—I painted sea onto 365 antique metal tins, completing them for the 59th Venice Biennale as part of a wider artistic study of our changing seas.
With a strong desire to expand, to work expressively—with larger brushes and on a greater scale—in the summer of 2022 I began work on a new series; one which references past projects while exploring new themes.
As is the nature of my practice, the substrates had to be recycled, formed from repurposed materials as much as possible. The surfaces I usually paint onto are readymade objects (wooden boxes, tins, drawers) and so an increase in scale brings challenges. I’ve been collecting antique nautical maps, rolls of part-used vintage canvas, bus-blinds and more; pasting them to various kinds of board, sometimes collaging book covers and other miscellaneous cardboard items on top. Plaster is applied to some; others are filled, sanded and gessoed. Working large (predominantly in oil) means long drying times between layers, so I work on pieces in rotation. I had a vision for this series, for each work to abstractly describe cropped closeups of sea surface, without sky or land, with reflected sunlight as the protagonist. The image of sea surface can be infinitely abstracted.
Here, I am expressively, bodily, determinedly painting—with much larger brushes. The time it takes for each layer to dry allows reflection, and each subsequent layer becomes more deliberate. Grooves and channels are formed, then traced and re-traced—like the telling and re-telling of a familiar story. Shapes of loops and curves described in thick swells of paint, with emphasis placed on the negative space. Each layer changes the dynamic of the piece in question. Some are hard won, others emerge as if meant to be. I pick out details with small brushes, pushing back areas of shadow, adding highlights and bright spots of sunlight intuitively. Those marks respond to the paint beneath, to the marks made during that period of great physical activity.
Apart from this principal series of large-scale seas, painted mostly onto bus-blinds and canvases, my recent work also includes paintings upon boat pulleys, decorator’s stamps, doors, tins, codfish boxes, artist’s boxes, matchboxes and various types of card.
One grouping takes inspiration from the dramatic sea paintings of Dutch Old Masters, these afforded the opportunity to paint more representationally, with a more exaggerated palette. Initially created for an exhibition at Christie’s, London in late 2023, these pieces present another pace and a brief return to a small scale, but using techniques learned from the larger abstract works.
Conceptually, Light at Water leads on from Rising Horizon.
Rising Horizon was formed of seascapes—painted in oil onto predominantly found metal substrates—which charted an ever-increasing horizon-line, each titled as a percentage relative to the height of the painted sea, making reference to the issue of rising sea levels, with key works along the way designed to highlight the reasons behind this significant element of the climate crisis (steel roadsigns were used as painting surfaces to highlight pollution from transportation, a copper boiler referenced thermal expansion of seawater). Light on Water does the same, though rather than exploring the many reasons behind rising seawater, it looks specifically at one: the storage capacity of our oceans. The very fact that most of the works feature only sea (without sky) suggests that a limit has been reached—our oceans cannot take any more.
Our oceans are storing an estimated 91 percent of the excess heat energy trapped in the Earth’s climate system. As warming climbs exponentially, our planet’s oceans—also home to most of its life—won’t be able to store any more of it. Every other breath we take comes from microscopic underwater organisms. That same water is absorbing nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface.
If we look to the North & South Poles—Earth’s thermostats—the consequences of warming water are disastrous. Here, we are faced with one of the most striking visuals of the climate crisis: a battle of light vs. dark.
Reduce (2023–24) 31.5 x 88cm, oil, solar reflective paint, spray paint & ink on primed wooden box lid
Several Light on Water paintings have been painted with what could be described as a monochrome palette. Or, they show a clear contrast between dark and light. In these works, the lighter marks (painted in part with a specialist solar reflective paint) represent ice, bouncing sunlight away and protecting the sea below. The dark paintwork (including Indian ink) represents sea.
Persist (2023–24) 35 x 37cm, oil, oil bar & pastel on plastered & primed bus blinds on board
As we lose ice, we also lose its ability to reflect sunlight. Less white reflective ice at our Poles means more dark heat-storing sea; more heated sea means more melting ice. In a warming planet, ice can’t re-form. It’s the ice that provides the Earth’s climate with the balance that we need.
Within the exhibition book, another project can be found: the Lost Ice Archive. Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting old photographs, slides, postcards and news cuttings featuring (long lost) ice—bergs, sheets, floes, glaciers, snow—to form an archive of sorts. Certainly, the ice featured in each of these images is now melted. There’s a deep sadness to the loss of these mammoth bergs, once seen as a “menace” (as more than one news clipping states) they are today indicators of our planet’s health. Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has increased fivefold since the 1990s, and now accounts for a quarter of sea-level rise. The Greenland ice cap alone is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour; calving ice making way for dark heat-storing sea.
I reached out to friends and family to help title the works, to offer words which encouraged sustainable action. The resulting titles read like a mission statement, striving for positivity and communal action, for it is by coming together that we might limit global warming.
Study,
Identify,
Commit,
Account,
Contribute,
Consider,
Reflect,
Resist,
Slow,
Act.
