TRAVELLING

I call this series of paintings my Travelling series. In these pieces combining a diversity of people in congested public spaces, there is room for much interaction between people, with many different stories and subplots to be told. I have used multiple vantage points in these paintings in order to allow a viewer to enter them in many ways. There is no singular way to read them and hopefully there is enough ambiguity to inspire investigation.

These paintings, as with all of my work from the imagination, "arrived" in the process of painting. They did not start with a fixed preconception. They started by setting a loose framework, a spatial construction, a locus for interaction. These scenes were to be areas of transition. I knew that I wanted them to be crowded with people. As I had just returned from two and a half months in Europe and had been thinking about painting throughout my trip I knew that this was where I wanted my focus to be. It was the first time in 35 years that I had seen Europe during the summer when tourism is at its peak. I wanted as much to see all the displaced tourists scrambling to see the art, the spires and the crumbling walls of Europe as I wanted to see the art itself. I wanted it all together. The tourists, and me as one of them, are as much a part of "seeing Europe" as the objects and places that one thinks of going to see. Thus, I was in the position of viewer viewing viewer viewing views. It is all a succession of mirrors.

Painting, like travelling, is filled with excitement, wonder and uncertainty. We often do not know where we are headed, what comes next. All possibilities are open. But if we are to move there are choices. There are risks. We are caught at boundaries of decision/indecision. We are on the brink of something. What matters? This way or that? It is at that brink that we have vitality.