I have found through practice that if one looks carefully and for long enough at anything it will resonate within. After a while of this kind of looking there is a moment where one stops seeing the surface of the thing and there is a change. In a sense there is a transformation, not in the object, but in oneself. Everything for this moment is different: deeper, quieter and somehow more real. In my work I am seeking these flashing moments; full of colour, dazzling even, when the distortion subsides and we truly see.

The difficulty is in looking, or to be accurate, seeing. The more one actively seeks images of resonance the more they tend conform to one’s own particular set of preferences. Essentially what I ‘see’ is a rehash of what I have already seen with a few contextual revisions. Frustrated by this I began to contrive ways of finding new, random images to work from.

With this in mind I asked two friends, Alex Renton and James Fergusson, to take photographs for me and have then used only these images as a departure for this series of paintings. Both award wining writers, Alex was about to go to Haiti post Earthquake and James was heading to Afghanistan so I gave them each a shoddy disposable camera with the request to shoot the 24 exposures at random, without fuss.

I found the developed photographs astonishing. Uncluttered, unframed and largely instinctive, the images felt more authentic somehow in all their lack of gloss. There was something tremendously silent about them, deceptively bland at first and yet almost magical on closer inspection.

Having spent time with each photograph I began to distil them to their essential internal geometry while retaining the external rectangular dimension. From this process I made small collage paintings, some are exhibited in the exhibition. I used colours from the photographs and exaggerated the intensity, often using only a small element of the photograph as a spectral key. I then analysed the photographs and collages together using the golden ratio, looking for the golden mean within the shapes and forms of the image.

The next step was to change the external dimension to a square to remove the landscape element of the images. I wanted to remove all sense of the narrative representation of the image to give the essential (internal) geometry free reign and allude to the essence behind the form. At this point I also wanted to introduce a painterly and instinctive response to the shapes, forms and structure.

Each painting from this point on is an amalgam of my response to the photograph, the distilled geometry and golden ratio and to an abstract inner feeling. The paintings are as much about the present moment when they are being painted in my studio as they are about their genesis on a dusty road in Afghanistan or Haiti. They are an attempt to puncture the linear illusion of time in a sense. They are a look at (and behind) the image and a look within simultaneously.


*‘Divina Proportione’ is taken from the title of the 1509AD manuscript ‘De Divina Proportione’ written by Luca Pacioli with illustrations (and collaboration) by Leonardo Da Vinci. The book outlines mathematical and artistic proportion, especially the mathematics of the golden ratio.