The Process
Between 2019 and 2022 I worked almost exclusively on a tiny scale, with miniature brushes and intense focus. Before, during and after lockdown—and through three studio moves—I painted sea onto 365 antique metal tins, completing them for the 59th Venice Biennale as part of a wider artistic study of our changing seas.
With a strong desire to expand, to work expressively—with larger brushes and on a greater scale—in the summer of 2022, I began preparing new substrates to paint onto. As is the nature of my practice, these surfaces had to be recycled, formed from repurposed materials as much as possible.
The surfaces I usually paint onto are readymade objects (wooden boxes, tins, drawers) and so an increase in scale brings challenges. I collected antique nautical maps, rolls of part-used vintage canvas, and I unearthed a job-lot of bus-blinds I’d found in Brussels years earlier. I pasted these to various kinds of board, sometimes collaging book covers and other miscellaneous cardboard items on top. I applied plaster to some, filled, sanded and gessoed others. I prepared at least a dozen surfaces before starting to paint. Working large (predominantly in oil) means long drying times between layers, and I wanted to work on these pieces in rotation, so that they evolved together. I had a vision for the series, for each work to abstractly describe cropped closeups of sea surface, without sky or land, with reflected sunlight as the protagonist. The image of sea surface can be infinitely abstracted.
I strapped these assembled alternative canvases to the balcony and laid others out on dustsheets all throughout my apartment, before expressively, bodily, determinedly painting—with much larger brushes. I spent the first two years applying layers, experimenting with textures of oil paint, pastel and spray paint. The time it took for each layer to dry allowed reflection, and each subsequent layer became more deliberate. Grooves and channels were formed, then traced and re-traced—like the telling and re-telling of a familiar story. Shapes of loops and curves were described in thick swells of paint, with emphasis placed on the negative space. Each layer changed the dynamic of the piece in question. Some were hard won, others emerged as if meant to be.
Each of the thirty main paintings which forms ‘Light on Water’ came to life at the same time; they were shaped together, each describing sea at different times of day (and night)
I lived surrounded by the paintings. I started work in an apartment which took in a great panorama of the ever-changing Aegean Sea. I let the view filter into everything I did, I learned from it, yet I rarely looked at the sea whilst painting. Inland and far from the sea, I spent the final months before framing picking out details with those small brushes again, pushing back areas of shadow, adding highlights and bright spots of sunlight intuitively. Those marks responded to the paint beneath, to the marks made during that period of great physical activity.
Apart from this principal series of large-scale seas which now cover The Scottish Gallery’s north wall, painted mostly onto bus-blinds and canvases, the exhibition also includes works painted onto boat pulleys, decorator’s stamps, doors, tins, codfish boxes, artist / maker’s boxes, matchboxes and various types of card, arriving at a total of ten substrate categories—a nod to the exhibition anniversary. Similarly, the exhibition contains ten groupings of works.
The Concept
‘Light at Water’ is my tenth solo-exhibition, continuing directly from ‘Rising Horizon’ in 2019. The show is both a survey—celebrating the subjects and surfaces I’ve dedicated the last fifteen years to—and a concept show in its own right.
‘Rising Horizon’ was formed of seascapes—painted in oil onto predominantly found metal substrates—which charted an ever-increasing horizon-line, each titled as a percentage relative to the height of the painted sea, making reference to the issue of rising sea levels, with key works along the way designed to highlight the reasons behind this significant element of the climate crisis (steel roadsigns were used as painting surfaces to highlight pollution from transportation, a copper boiler referenced thermal expansion of seawater). ‘Light on Water’ does the same, though rather than exploring the many reasons behind rising seawater, it looks specifically at one: the storage capacity of our oceans.
Our oceans are storing an estimated 91 percent of the excess heat energy trapped in the Earth’s climate system. As warming climbs exponentially, our planet’s oceans—also home to most of its life—won’t be able to store any more of it. Every other breath we take comes from microscopic underwater organisms. That same water is absorbing nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface.
If we look to the North & South Poles—Earth’s thermostats—the consequences of warming water are disastrous. Here, we are faced with one of the most striking visuals of the climate crisis: a battle of light vs. dark.
Several ‘Light on Water’ paintings have been painted with what could be described as a monochrome palette. Or, they show a clear contrast between dark and light. In these works, the lighter marks (painted in part with a specialist solar reflective paint) represent ice, bouncing sunlight away and protecting the sea below. The dark paintwork (which includes Indian ink) represents sea. As we lose ice, we also lose its ability to reflect sunlight. Less white reflective ice at our Poles means more dark heat-storing sea; more heated sea means more melting ice. In a warming planet, ice can’t re-form. It’s the ice that provides the Earth’s climate with the balance that we need. Within the exhibition book, another project can be found, the last of the ten groupings: the ‘Lost Ice Archive’. Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting old photographs, slides, postcards and news cuttings featuring (long lost) ice – bergs, sheets, floes, glaciers, snow – to form an archive of sorts. Certainly, the ice featured in each of these images is now melted. There’s a deep sadness to the loss of these mammoth bergs, once seen as a “menace” – as more than one news clipping states – they are today indicators of our planet’s health. Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has increased fivefold since the 1990s, and now accounts for a quarter of sea-level rise. The Greenland ice cap alone is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour; calving ice making way for dark heat-storing sea.
I reached out to friends and family to help title the works, to offer words which encouraged sustainable action. The resulting titles read like a mission statement, striving for positivity and communal action, for it is by coming together that we might limit global warming.
Study, Identify, Account, Consider, Reflect, Reach, Commit, Slow, Contribute, Turn, Resist, Persist…
The paintings which form the wall of abstract works in ‘Light on Water’—positioned above and below eye level so as to immerse the viewer—each come together to celebrate and consider the same sea.
