Fear, anger, anxiety, powerlessness. These are often generated by bad news items. Sometimes I have responded by producing art work, not out of political zeal, but to try and come to terms with my own feelings. I am not Banksy, nor Picasso, or Otto Dix and it is done for personal, internal “therapy”, not to proclaim the truth to the world.
The first painting was done in the early 1990s, and was a direct response to the Kurds escaping to the mountains from the forces of Saddam Hussain. I wanted to avoid obvious realism, so I replaced figures with abstract shapes.
The next work was my contribution to a local artists' exhibition entitled “ The Millennium “at Hemel Hempstead in 2000. I tried very self-consciously to show how India is a mix of modernity and poverty.
In 2019 there was much news coverage of extensive wildfires in Australia. I had a metre square canvas and I enjoyed attacking in with a decorators brush and lots of swirls of red. It turned into a kind of landscape and the idea of the Exodus came to mind. I borrowed some figures from one of Goya's black paintings and it grew into a column of refugees.
I had another large canvas hanging around, and inspired by the last painting, and full of worries about global warming, I attacked again with sweeps from large brushes. I also remembered the Kurds painting from the nineties and had another exodus of geometric shapes. A year or two later I added the ghostly perspective shapes because I felt it needed another level.
Covid added an unfamiliar level of anxiety for all of us. I was obsessed for a while with faces hidden by masks. This one started with some faces found on the internet. I had no idea of where it was going, but the background came out of my head quickly and the final result seemed to me to capture some of my worry about what was happening.
I have only got as far as lockdown. There is more recent stuff to show. Stay tuned.