Chinua Achebe's book had a huge effect on me when I read it as a teenager. The paintings were the first ones to clearly demonstrate that a political unconscious could be illustrated by these methods of painting and thought. The white man, Mr Brown effects a perfect and bloody erasure of the colour and dynamism of the earlier part of the book.
diam. 60cm
(1951)
The first of the Foundation books. This is a series of paintings which encompasses the original trilogy of Asimov's series plus the two later volumes published in the 1980. The concept of a circular painting utilising a lot of iridescent and glimmering paint and embracing glitches , erasures and reappearances of colour is a response to the subject matter, which covers huge amounts of space time and distance. It is reminscent of something that can only be detected by extremely sensitive scientific instruments and may be just on the very edges of normal sensory perception. The paintings react to light and the angle of viewing in singular ways.
diam. 60cm
(1952)
(1953)
diam. 60cm
(1982)
diam. 60cm
(1986)
Foundation and Empire in progress
Foundation and Empire in progress
Foundation's Edge in progress
Foundation's Edge in progress
120x60cm
The first John le Carré novel, and the first featuring George Smiley. The painting is in some ways a commentary on the ambivalent wrestling with Britishness that le Carré engages with in nearly all of his writing.
Call for the Dead, detail
The colours from the text are overlayed upon the illustrations made by Sir John Tenniel for the original Lewis Carroll story.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, detail
60x60cm
Again using collage of the Tenniel drawings, Alice disappears into the chessboard to re-emerge on the second chessboard and into the world of the viewer. This painting also shows how colours can be extremely unevenly dispersed amidst the text - well over half of them occurring in the last few pages, or the last few squares of the chessboard.
Through the Looking Glass, detail
Through the Looking Glass, detail
A commissioned piece, this painting combines both of Carroll's texts and it is clear how much the Red and White Queens dominate the narrative.
110x60cm
photo: Stuart Conway
Best of times, worst of times... I like the fact that the ghost of a tricolor emerges in Dickens' story of the French Revolution.
photo: Stuart Conway
A Tale of Two Cities, detail
photo: Stuart Conway
A Tale of Two Cities, detail
In this early painting, the narrative elements of the story a quite readable - from the moment Raskolnikov murders the old woman through his confusion and doubt to the hint of redemption of at the end when green spring arrives in Siberia. Yellow tends to indicate the presence of the prostitute Sonya, Raskolnikov's ultimate saviour.
F.Scott Fitzgerald's disturbing and tragic story of decadence, loneliness and deceit in "Jazz-age" New York is full of colour. A golden background seemed fitting.
The Great Gatsby#1, detail
The Great Gatsby#1, detail
A Hero of Our Time, detail
A Hero of Our Time, detail
A Hero of Our Time, detail
(prehistory)
100x30cm
This is merely the opening section of Iris Murdoch's strange and alluring novel. It is full of glittering colour. The main narrative (History), will follow soon...
180x70cm
photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
This is an intense painting with a great depth of impasto towards the end of the book and the work. This becomes more sculptural than painterly and there are great canyons within the surface of the paint in which it is possible to see the strata of the many layers that emerge from dystopia.
1984#1, detail (in progress)
180x70cm
photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
This is a companion piece to 1984#1 and the colours are organised on a different principle - rather than the total number of colours dictating the placement of each layer, the organising principle here is the position of the colour within the physical context of the book. In a sense this is a more faithful 'map' of the text.
photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
1984#2, detail
180x70cm
This simpler (and far quicker) rendition of 1984 is a non-impasto version of #1. It can easily be scanned by eye from left to right to give a sense of teh unfolding of the text and Winston Smith's journey through awakening, rebellion, love in the spring bluebells, the symbolic song Oranges and Lemons through to the black and white imposition and capitulation to Big Brother and Totalitarianism.
120x40cm
This horizontal composition is organised along the same principles as 1984#2. The colours appear on the canvas in a position analagous to the page and line they appear in the book, if one imagines the surface of the canvas as representative of the structure of the novel.
120x40cm
A bleeding horizon line lies behind the onslaught of paint.
All Quiet on the Western Front#2 , detail
All Quiet on the Western Front#2 , detail
All Quiet on the Western Front#2 , detail
120x60cm
This one is oil paint on an acrylic background with the oil layer applied in one 'hit'.
120x40cm
Sartre's text provides some particular philosophical issues if one attempts to fix the meaning of his writing in paint. The main protagonist Antoine Roquentin frequently comes face to face with the problem of his own existence, prompting him to describe objects as 'not black' or 'not red' and so on. I tend to think that the word 'not' does not negate the colour word sufficiently for it to be omitted. And in fact the very negation of the colour brings it to existence in the mind... paradoxically. I have an ambivalent relationship to Sartre's ideas, some of which inform the basis of the construction of these paintings (but which are more than likely erroneous). Nausea is a fantastic book, however, and there cannot be many equal descriptions of what a realisation of the very fact of existence might do to one if you think too much about it.
Ali Smith's superb prose has a kind of postmodern - modernist edge that sometimes makes me think of Virginia Woolf. Her subject matter, however, is always pertinent to contemporaneous cultural, political and societal issues. The novels are allusive and intense but also with a fantastic lightness of touch. The books often display an intense interest in paintings and the history of art and there are close readings of paintings within the novels. This helps to make the books very interesting to work with from a perspective of making paintings.
60x60cm
Autumn, complex, pointed and allusive, published in 2016 and about 2016 and Brexit. But it is also about the 1960s and the pop artist Pauline Boty. The collage here is from a Boty painting (Untitled). The colour's of Smith's text make a kind of circle or clock (or EU flag?). And it is serendipitous that the pink and azure colours in the top right (where the woman is looking) correspond to those in the Boty painting where they consist of lace collage.
Autumn, detail
Autumn, detail
Autumn, detail
150x50cm
photo: Stuart Conway
How to be Both is a dual narrative: one strand of which concerns a bereaved teenager in present-day Cambridge and the other is about Francesco del Cossa, a fifteenth century fresco painter. A del Cossa altarpiece in the National Gallery links the two narratives which also merge in many other ways concerning the nature of time, art, grief and gender. The background of my painting is an abstracted nod to this del Cossa painting - with a corraline stripe in an azure sky echoing the fantastical clouds common to such altarpieces. Apparently two versions of the text were published, with differing narratives appearing first. For this reason, in my painting the two stories begin at either end of the canvas and merge in the middle. The painting can be hung either way up.
photo: Stuart Conway
How to be Both, detail
photo: Stuart Conway
How to be Both, detail
How to be Both, detail
How to be Both, detail
diam. 90cm
120x40cm
In this great experimental novel, Virginia Woolf explores the nature of subjectivity and passing time through combining a narrative of one day with the story of the whole lives of a group of friends. The surface of this painting becomes like the surface of the sea and the colours seem to form a particularly harmonious whole when put together.
The Waves#2, detail
150x50cm
120x120cm
This painting is very specifically about what forms the canon of English 'stories', who chooses them and what this means. the central textual 'Editorial Foreword' is of startling banality and the explosion of colours that emanate from it show that such banality is inadequate. The foreword ignores issues of race, colonialism, sexism, and class, all of which haunt the stories themselves. It casually dismisses the only two women authors who were selected. This collection of short stories was being taught as exemplary of literature without social criticism at leaidng universities well into the 20th Century. I wanted to turn it into an explosion.
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories, detail
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories, detail
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories, detail (in progress)
140x120cm
This collection of magical, sometimes disturbing tales often under the influence of Baba Yaga, shows a diversity of depth of colour all of it intensely symbolic. There is a lot of vying for gold in fairy tales. And the malachite mines of the Urals and the 'Mistress of the Copper Mountain' who protects or haunts them also provides a source for the vivid greens and metallic colours in this painting.
20x20cm
20x20cm
The term 'concentrationary' derives from the French concentrationnaire, used by poets and thinkers in the immediate post war years to describe the 'concentrationary universe'. This is society defined by a matrix of concentration camps - places where the law is suspended and within which 'anything can happen'. The word concentrationary has been given a new currency in recent scholarship where it is recognised that the conditions of the concentrationary universe did not disappear in 1945 or with the death of Stalin but inhabit the structures of everyday life in modern society. The concentrationary haunts our bureaucracies, the workplace, airports, agriculture, political policy and is most evident in the actual concentration camps that are immigration detention centres. There is a problem of forgetting, obviously, but there is a perhaps greater problem of not realising that the concentrationary has never gone away.
120x40cm
Adolph Hitler's evil text creates a visceral impact in paint. Red dominates, mainly because of his ranting obsession with Communism. The visceral surface of the painting could be reminscent of the plastination techniques of Gunter Van Hagen's Bodyworlds exhibitions. This painting has been exhibited against or alongside Primo Levi's If This is a Man (see below), as a comment on the concentrationary imaginary. It is meant to show that colours are not simply colours but that they can have a devastating meaning. Hitler endlessly reiterates the symbolism and meaning of colours within the text of Mein Kampf, hence a kind of recurring echo of the German flag. The electric blue colour that runs through from the beginning and somewhat enlivens the painting is a quirk of translation - from the phrase 'out of the blue'. The original German does not contain a reference to blue, so this becomes further abstracted through the double translation from German to English and then once more to paint.
Mein Kampf, detail
Mein Kampf, detail
180x180cm
This painting is something of a commentary on the importance of the witness. The colours that emerge from Primo Levi's account of his concentrationary existence (barely life) at Auschwitz, are the only readable factor in a grey abstracted field. The colours are highly symbolic and meaningful. The preponderance of gold, for example is referential to the gold extracted from Jewish teeth in the concentration camps. The exterior grey border is also a nod to the debates about the representability or otherwise of the Holocaust, without being a symbol of it.
