My Drawings I
These drawings are transitional
between the work from my time at art school (1979-83) until the early 90s and
everything from then until the present day. They resulted from a crisis in
which I could no longer paint. Every time I tried I was overcome with anxiety
and the painting would vanish in a grey mess. So I started to draw
automatically in earnest, outpacing the anxiety - which I did not especially
feel in the rest of my life - through speed. The amorphous forms were given a
little definition, sometimes self-consciously thinking of Matta as I did so as
he often seemed to be influencing the work. Others now remind me a little of
Arshile Gorky. Through furious scribbling and then erasing I found a precarious
balance from which point I could move forward. The oddest thing was I suddenly
found it impossible to do small drawings, all my sketchbooks stopped about this
time and for several years.
The subject often seems to be a
collision of inner and outer spaces, both melting and fusing or opposing and in
conflict. Both the object/beings in the drawings and the space they live in
seem to be barbed, toothed and clawed. Sometimes with the earlier works I had a
vague notion of a sort of cosmic war in which vast beings, minerals and
energies battled with each other. Presumably this reflected my own inner
conflicts, but I felt unable at first to fully form these conflicts as their
implied scale seemed what? Pretentious? But they were not, for the sense of
conflict was very real to me and I was led, almost blindly, to a different way
of drawing.
Looking back at them now, I can
see that a part of their inspiration was the walls and other surfaces that
constituted many of my photographs. I no longer seem to know if I was aware of
this at the time, but in at least some of these images the two seem to
intertwine and form one vision.
