Artist's Statement: 2000.
My studio work has, since December 1996, been dominated by an extended series of paintings which take as their point of departure the tradition of Icon painting. Working within with this framework I make use of a wide range of processes and materials, including my own photography, commercial imagery (such as advertising), photo copies, computer generated imagery, found objects and the more traditional process of painting itself.This wide range of materials and processes are brought together in fairly tight geometric compositions which seek to integrate these divergent methods and traditions of representation into a coherent aesthetic.
I have chosen to call this series ICON for a number of reasons. At a purely visual level these works reflect aspects of the Iconic tradition, for example, the simple rather geometric nature of their compositional structures, and the visual contrast created between a central figurative element set within a highly abstracted field of colour. As with Icons, my paintings refer the viewer to the idea of the contemplative, the transcendental, dealing with issues that are concerned not with the local but with the universal, images which seek to represent a kind of a mental space, much like a map, a landscape that is both a place and yet not a place, like the possibilities of landscape that might have drifted through God's head before he or she ever put pen to paper.
As this series of paintings has developed the theme of landscape, and more particularly the notion of the invented landscape, has become my central concern. With their references to cities and gardens and the landscapes of Mars the most recent paintings seek to address the idea that inspite of our sense of alienation we are still an integral part of the landscape, that it is at many levels a place of our own invention, a place to which we give many additional layers of meaning; symbolic, allegorical, transcendental, a place which in some fundamental way we complete by our presence in it.