Statement
I paint what lies beneath the surface.
Each painting begins with structure: a ground laid in layers, a grid I measure before I make a mark, often proportions taken from the golden ratio. Then the surface is worked over and worn back until it looks
lived in. Black is built from other colours, never used straight from the tube. Rust seeps from under it. Colour tears through it in places, the way something long held finally surfaces.
The layers are the point.
Each painting is a portrait of the parts within a person: distinct, interconnected, sometimes fighting for attention, sometimes finding a way to coexist. Rough, worked passages hold the
struggle. Quiet ground holds the moments of cohesion.
The work is about integration. Not cutting away the dark, but holding it alongside everything else until something new comes through. Legion of D'angels began there: the angel and the demon in a single word. The brightness in these paintings exists because the black was there to tear.
A red line runs through all of it. It is the thread that connects one painting to the next, and one turn of a life to the next. You never fully arrive. Every integration becomes the ground for the next turning.
Some paintings hold a lot of empty space, which I leave there deliberately because restraint lets the few things that matter be seen. Others are crowded and chaotic, layer on layer and most hold both, the quiet and the noise in the same surface. Look closely and you may find an eye, or a heart, hidden in the surface. They are there for whoever takes the time.
At times, I also use the golden ratio, roughly 1 to 1.618, the proportion Luca Pacioli called divine in 1509 and one that turns up in the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower and the spiralling of leaves around a stem. It works as a quiet scaffold: I place a red line or the edge of a black block on its divisions so that the composition holds even when the surface around it is worn, torn or crowded. Whether it is truly more
beautiful than any other proportion is still argued over, but that isn’t really why I use it. For me it is a way of trusting an order underneath, one you sense more than see and it suits paintings that are about
exactly that: a structure holding steady beneath whatever is happening on the surface.
The
red
line
The red line
The alchemists called their work the Great Work, and they described it in four colours.
Black: Nigredo.
The breaking down. Confronting what has been kept in the dark.
White: Albedo.
The first light after the darkness.
Yellow: Citrinitas.
The dawning. Movement toward something whole.
REd:
Rubedo.
Integration. The thing that could not have existed before the process.
My paintings hold all four. The black blocks, built from layers of colour. The cream grounds, worked until they look weathered. The ochre and rust that seep out from beneath. And the red line.
But the alchemists never did the work once. Their instruction was solve et coagula: dissolve, then bind, then begin again. Every red became the raw material for the next black.
That is what the red line means to me. You never fully arrive, and that is the beauty of it. In some paintings the line rises out of the dark. In others it goes back down into it. Both are part of the same work. Every turn leads to the next.
Process
Process
Every painting starts with moving before. Freddie, my dachshund, and I head out early, often in the dark,sometimes scrambling up parts of the Cotswold Way before the world wakes up and then walk into thestudio with a clear head. The first decisions of the day, the ones that set the structure, get made in that clear window.
The structure.
I measure before I paint. The blocks and lines sit on golden-ratio divisions, an order underneath that you sense more than see.
the black.
Never just black. Each block is mixed from cool and warm piles, dragged on with a knife so the weave of the canvas shows through, then scratched into while it is still wet.
The rust, the tear and the scrape.
Rust is washed in to bleed from beneath the black. In some paintings, colour is laid underneath first and torn or scraped back through it, like a poster ripped from a wall.
The REd Line.
Last of all. One decisive line.
The best moments are single gestures: one scrape, one sweep, then I step back. The hardest part of painting is knowing when to stop.
