Funding would allow me to concentrate on figure painting and to develop and complete a planned series of large pictures with the working title: 'Allegories of Painting'. My intention is to use the nude to explore the possibilities of embodying truths, meanings and values in the human figure and in paint.
My starting point for a figure painting is usually an 'idea' that is developed, in collaboration with the model, through a series of drawings and painting studies before it reaches the final canvas. Because the starting point is an 'idea' or mental image, there is a strong imaginative element in this sort of painting: I work with the model in order to strengthen this mental image, using the model to find what I want to see, rather than simply observing and copying what is before me. There is much trial and error in this process. Even in the final stages I try to paint freely and spontaneously, often subjecting the pictures to violent revision, obliterating and repainting areas repeatedly until they 'work'. All this takes time: paintings can take months and even years to reach completion in this way. I believe the results of this method are incomparable and well worth the effort artistically, but investing so much labour into a single painting is hard to justify economically.
Working with nude models from life is expensive: models typically charge more than €100 per day, and the cost of completing one of my figure paintings from life can run into thousands of Euros. Receipt of the Golden Fleece Award would remove some of the financial impediments to producing this sort of work. It would allow me to set up a fund dedicated exclusively to paying models and covering the material costs of producing these paintings.
I see myself as essentially a figurative painter in the European tradition, attempting to maintain my craft at the highest level, using painting to explore issues of truth, meaning and value. All my paintings are attempted answers to the three questions in the title of Gauguin's famous painting: 'What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?'
My paintings are founded upon a study of nature because I believe in nature as the basis for all life, all beauty, all our wealth, and we neglect or abuse it at our peril. The human image is central to my work because I believe we need images of ourselves to gain self-understanding; to comprehend our relationships with each other and with nature.
Cennino Cennini said 600 years ago that painting 'calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects ... presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist'. I am still essentially committed to painting as Cennini defined it. But whereas painters in Cennini's day could paint a Crucifixion or a Madonna and find in this image the highest embodiment of truth, meaning, value and purpose for their society, our society lacks images that articulate common beliefs, common values and meanings.
My response to this situation is to start from scratch, to go back to nature and the human form, back to my own first principles and to try to paint new images that can embody my own convictions, in the hope that they find a response, strike a chord with others. Although grounded in traditional skills, I see this project as one of renewal, building a new culture with new values, truths and meanings.
