Through the process of drawing and painting i am engaged in the archeology of material culture, inspecting, exploring and celebrating physical manifestations of human history. My work is all about people really, though they are conspicuously absent from my paintings. I am fascinated by what we built and what we did. It’s a kind of anthropology. My paintings are lovesongs.
Born into a family of architects, I have an abiding passion for buildings and the fabric of cities; bricks and mortar, plaster, concrete and steel. I have been looking at the aging, decaying parts of buildings for as long as I can remember. I think the life of a city, of a culture, of a family or business is revealed in the ways that our structures age. We put up signs, take them down, breakout a new window, board it up, pop an extract fan in, add a tv aerial, repair some storm damage, renovate and redecorate. The passing of the seasons and the touching of a hundred dirty hands by the doorhandle reveal the patterns of use and decay that mirror our own lives in some way. In some sense I think my work is a kind of portraiture hoping to reveal more than just the appearance of things but revealing something of the life of things. I am fascinated by the corrosive relationship between the design of objects, the evidence of their use and the passage of time. My work explores the world that we have built, it’s adaptation and inevitable decay. Buildings and Tools bear scars and grow weary with years of service. I love the Eiffel Tower as much as the next man, but its not the essence of what it feels like to be in Paris and to experience Parisian life. That is found in the graphics, the mansard roofs, the space between the windows, the communal entrances to apartment buildings, the bus stops, the street names and building numbers, the folding chairs and the newsstands. It’s those, everyday pieces that I want to celebrate in my work, hopefully revealing their dignity and importance through the energy of my composition and mark making. I’m always experimenting in the studio. I have never considered myself a purist, nor even defined myself as a watercolourist even though thats pretty much all I’ve ever done. There is something liquid about my work and water, as the primary agent, wants to flow, splash and drip, so I think one would say that my work is unmistakably watercolour, but I have spent years trying to escape the flatness of the page by adding non water soluble elements, thickening agents, collage and applying paint straight out of the tube with my fingers and palette knives and rubbing it away with shirt sleeves and paper towels.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and of The American Impressionists Society. In 2008 I was awarded the Turner Medal in London.