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why I paint pets
You may or may not have a pet, but there is no doubt that animals or the images thereof
will play a part in your life. One cannot open a magazine or watch the adverts on T.V.
without one of our four legged friends making an appearance.
The relationship that we have towards other animals is to personalize them or
to mythologize them. Of all the animals which are most affected by this personalization,
are dogs and cats. Not satisfied with the way nature designed them we continue to genetically
modify them to suit our needs, no matter how trivial.
It is this intimate relationship that we have with our pets that fascinates me.
Nowadays dogs in particular have become a fashion statement, or an indication of lifestyle.
For example the ubiquitous Staffie, favoured by londoners of a certain milieu, is seen as urban,
street and a bit hard.
Dogs have become their own logos fro the brands that they are, and we know how to recognize them.
In my paintings i like to play with this cultural language, of how we read animals, and how we mould
them to fit our lives, and what it says about our relationship to them.
In some paintings the animal is simply presented with a plain background as a personality, the
focus being on the perceived character. I am particularly interested in the more extreme examples
of breeding in these paintings. It is like my own personal freak show.
In some of my other pieces I am interested in the juxtaposition of certain breeds with objects or landscapes,
which at times create familiar cliches that contain a certain irony. For example an image of a Springer
Spaniel against the rolling landscape of a grand park, for me is reminiscent of Gainsborough's portrait of
Mr and Mrs Andrews.
In other pieces i like to use the format of a still life, where the object suggests a story around the animal.
Making use of contemporary things set the paintings very much in our time, but the inspiration comes
rom the dutch painters of the seventeenth century, with their enduring theme of Las Vanitas. (the vanities of life)
Many painters have been inspired to use animals for their symbolic value, that is to imbue them with
feelings and ideas of which they become a vehicle of expression.
The dog with it's astounding variety of forms makes it a versatile subject of iconography.
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Bulzei
Pop Art, and art of the sixties in general, has been having something of a renaissance in recent years,
and I decided I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and join in the fun. The target is a decorative device
that has been used again and again through out the late 20th C. Jasper Johns is one such artist who
repeatedly used the target in his work, as seen in his piece 'Target with four faces' (1958) and another
artist who also uses the target for entirely different reasons is Kenneth Noland with his piece 'Reverberation (1961).
Targets pop up all over the place as a graphic device, album covers, logos, and many other art forms.
Most recently, a piece commissioned by London Underground's Platform for Art, entitled 'you are in London'
(2004) by Emma Kaye emblazoned the walkways of many a tube station.
Such is the popularity of the target that it seemed a suitable image to use in order to create a 'modern art'
background, where it becomes a decorative method with which to present the subject. I was pleasantly
surprised by the dynamism that it adds to the image.
I chose a Bullterrier for this painting, because like the target, bullterriers are popular not only as pets, but also
as images in
advertising, design and art, perhaps it is their unique profile that makes them so, or their robust personalities,
or the fact that to look at they are both comic and threatening at the same time. What ever it is, the fact remains
that their occurrence in graphic form is disproportionate to their numbers.
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Encaustic wax
Encustic, one of the oldest forms of easel painting painting originated in ancient Greece,
There is a purity and simplicity of ingredients
in which I find a great beauty: tree resin and pure pigment combined with
liquid wax. Once the colour is placed on the
surface it sets almost instantly as it cools, creating a medium which is lively and
immediate. There is a final heat treatment or burning in at the end, from which
encaustic derives it's name. This process serves to bond the surface.
I find it to be, despite it's very great age, a thoroughly modern medium.
And with today's digital images on canvas - the contemporary
Athena poster - it's difficult for people to
distinguish between a cheap multiple and an original artwork. An encaustic wax
painting has an
undeniable physical presence which demonstrates clearly it's originality.
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Giclee prints
Giclee prints, also known as Iris prints, were originally
developed in 1989 as a method of fine art printing.
Rather than applying ink to a plate, it is sprayed onto the paper -
in fact the word giclee comes from the French ‘to spray on’.
Although it is a relatively new medium, it has aready established
itself in the fine art market, and is proving to be particulally
popular in producing photgraphic or digital images.
The inks used to produce giclee prints use groundbreaking
technology in as much as they are pigment based and resin
coated. What this means is that the prints are of a high quality
with a rich vibrant finish, and the same kind of colour fixity you
would expect from a watercolour.
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oil and acrylics
Most of the commissions, and the more figurative fantasy work is in oil.
I find that it has a flexibility and variety of texture no other paint can
give. Impasto or glazes, wet or dry. the slow drying time means a
piece can really be worked into.
There is a wonderful purity in the medium, simple ingredients of linseed oil, pigment,
and turpentine, where necessary. Colours as brilliant or as subtle as you need.
For the surface I use canvas mostly,Oil on board is much sharper and smoother, whereas canvas is softer.
The beauty of acrylic is that it dries quickly. When you are doing very clean work
with hard edges,
which requires more than one coat, then acrylics are perfect.
They also give a fluidity you don't get with oils, particularly if you use
acrylics made with pigment in aqueous dispersion and P.V.A.
Another advantage is that acrylic paint does not damage raw canvas, unlike oils, so one can create beautiful staining effects
with the colour soaking right into the fabric of the cloth. This can be seen to great effect
in the paintings of the Post-Painterly Abstractionist, Morris Louis.
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mixed media
There are many pieces in the fantasy pages which use mixed media.
There was a period in my work where I favoured using a broken surface to work on.
Some of my work at that time was intuitive, finding marks in the surface and developing
them through imaginative association.
In terms of textures I was inspired by such artists as Tapies, Dubuffet, and the plate paintings of
Julian Schnabel.
Some of the materials that I have used, include: leaves, grass, eggshells, and sand.
I liked the idea of finding a ready made surface to work on. Things like rusty old bits of
corrigated iron, or discarded spot boards, peices of board used by builders to mix cement.
Not only do they often have wonderful surfaces, but the edges are rough and broken,
so one is not working on a uniformly rectangular space.
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