Paintings 1997

I've always wanted to be a painter, like a real painter that goes to the studio and paints, and has all these different paintings on the go, and you stare at one for ages, then you catch another one out of the corner of your eye and you realise what you need to do, and you jump up and finish that one. I like the idea of having everything contained within that space of the canvas. Ideally I'd be like Brice Marden, with a Summer studio in the Greek Islands. He paints in the morning, then  has lunch, he rides his horses, and/or goes for a swim. His paintings dry quickly in the heat, so he comes back and does a bit more on them in the late afternoon.

Here are some paintings I did in 1997. The first lot are from a show I did at Grey Area in April that year. (The ends of the long paintings got cut off in the slide scanner.)

These ones below are from a show Andrea Blundell and I did at Linden later that year, called 'Dialogue'. I don't have any photos of Andy's work - being a rampant egomaniac I didn't think to take any at the time. I asked Andy recently if she had any and she said they were at the bottom of a pile of boxes. We had that double room on the left as you go in. I was at the front and she was at the back. You can see her work a bit in the fourth photo down. 

My concept was to have an MDF box  sitting  on top of the mantlepiece, with the depth matching the depth of the marble, with the front painted in basic, screen-inspired shapes using a nice can of blue enamel paint I had found in the mis-tints pile. The side closer to the window was lighter green, because that side was closer to the window, so it was lighter - get it?  Once the box was made I realised how heavy it was. Not only how was I going to move it, but also that it would probably break the mantlepiece, which would be embarrassing, and expensive to replace. So I painted the four side parts following the theme of lighter  towards the window. Two were open shapes, giving the feeling of extending off the support,  and two were enclosing space within the painting.