OPEN AND SHUT

My next public show of work will be back at the Anise Gallery in Shad Thames, London.  The private view will be on March 13th, and it will run until April 13th.

I am not superstitious.  

I have chosen to call the show Open and Shut, after two of the principal works I am hanging:  you can see a part of Shut on my blog of 3rd January.  Here is its partner piece Open:

I have become increasingly fascinated by opposites.  Perhaps it is inevitable that, as a university lecturer, I try to resist the easy explanations that students so often want.  It seems to me that, alongside every idea that has shaped culture, there also lurks its apparent opposite - quite visible when you look for it, and ready to spring out at you. 

In a recent lecture on the Bauhaus, I was surprised and gratified when a student asked me how Feininger's woodcut, so suggestive of the medieval symbolism of light, could be used for the frontispiece of the Bauhaus' 1919 modernist manifesto.  Nothing is pure; nothing is easy; nothing is binary.  It's both-and, not either-or: or maybe I prefer neither-but.

My work reflects these complexities: I need to paint representations of distressed and derelict metal on clean, primed canvas.  I need to encapsulate what is rough and abrasive with varnish, which halts the processes of decay.  I need to work with colours that are alien to my subject: fizzy lemon for a rusty fo'c'sle chequerplate, or blancmange pink for a sheet of unspeakably mutilated ship-side, as we see here.

And - as an atheist since the age of 14 - I am happy to admit to the religious allusions underpinning some of my recent work.  The comments I made on Trip on my post of 20th December suggested it was some kind of closed triptych.