Last days by the river

The three works on this page were painted during my last month at my studio at the Three Waters of Bow Creek, East London. The paintings mark a point of departure for me, not only in terms of leaving a physical space, but also in terms of developing new ways of thinking about my practice and the role that painting plays in it. Painting is for me a way of working things out, of letting go of the idea that things have to mean something, but rather the idea that a painting simply is something in its own right. My process of painting and drawing is an ongoing learning experience, and each series of works is a way of figuring something out either technically speaking, or a way of processing thoughts that are impossible to put into words.

These works were inspired by a visit to the Guggenheim in Bilbao in June 2025, where I saw paintings by Helen Frankenthaler. Every time I think that I have fallen out of love with painting, something grabs me and brings me back in - in this case, Frankenthaler’s bold canvases painted in vast swathes of colour, loose, bold and powerful arrested me, and made me want to explore her techniques further. Painting is not a one track trajectory to get to an end destination, but one that migrates, changes, morphs, overlaps, re-writes itself over and over again.

I had started working on three canvases earlier in the year, which had become controlled and self-conscious, and I wanted to get away from that, so I worked in over the top with wide gestural marks using squeegees. I used lots of paint, wet on wet, and a lot of black and white. I had to fight myself when there were ‘perfect’ marks I didn’t want to lose, to give fully into the process, and allow the paintings to go where they wanted to go. For me, in these works it feels like the bold colours are breaking out from a dark solid structure, like plants growing out from a decaying building, a river takes hold, a flood perhaps, and then from the swell emerges a body dancing into tomorrow.