Ellipsis

In 2003 I had a solo museum show at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum in England, called Ellipsis - paintings and an intervention on the walls. For the intervention I tracked the history of past hangings in the smaller East Gallery by filling the indentations with colour - “the scars of previous exhibitions.” For the paintings, oil colour on wooden gesso panels, I devised a process of polishing the colour until the ground broke through, creating new emphases and patterns. They became increasingly complex as new layers were added and removed. Within this pavane of addition and attrition I identified, and for the first time wholly embraced, an autobiographical narrative.

I saw the origins of my obsession with painting in my childhood, watching my father continually decorating, fighting to transform the poor surfaces of our house, pushing back the tidemarks of poverty. Since that realisation, my fascination has been with the fugitive, puzzling nature of memory and perception and how that can be translated into paint.

“ Today images fly between diverse antennae, and the eye must move fast lest it be rendered obsolete. But here it is as though we had stumbled on the mainframe… Figurative images suggest themselves before fading: here an incandescent weather-system, seen from space, as a satellite turns its heat into light. A meadow of violets steps off and out of sight.

… And colour pushes on. An electric neon glosses a blue as old as midnight: here painting is not behind time, but steadily squaring it, encircling it, eliding it.”

Matthew Smith, Towards the Ellipsis – Ellipsis catalogue 2006