HOUSE ON FIRE | Studio Archive Sale

This might be where things start to taste a little strange – If I can say anything in retrospect about some of the works on paper presented here, especially those created around 2015/2016 - it would be that they are characterised by absurdity, humour, futility…and rage. Having finally managed to kick a horrible alcohol/substance abuse addiction (at age 39) I could finally present a sober, responsible individual to the world. But inside I was a boiling mess of anger, guilt, frustration and regret – all directed inwards. I knew I was an artist, but I had no idea what an art career looked like or if I was even embarking on one. Lacking any social skills that weren’t dependent on alcohol I needed an outlet. 

Enter, the studio. And boy, did I make use of it. Lacking any conceptual framework for what I wanted to do (at least none that I was consciously aware of) there was a deluge, an outpouring, a regurgitation of the repressed contents of my battered little brain. Much of it was (as Rassie recently described the Boks performance against the Wallabies at Ellis Park) …dogshit. But not all, when you work that much in the studio the good stuff comes too, consistency pays off, and a path (albeit winding and with many diversions) emerges.

I love the immediacy of some of these works, the weirdness, the lack of concern for what will come out. Staring at the blank surface at that time, frustration building, my approach seems to have been – just…do…something, anything! I had not yet acquired the painting skills I have worked so hard on over the past several years, but I could draw. And this is the thread, despite all the diversions, experimentation, changes in style (particularly between 2015 and 2020) that runs through it all, the fulcrum one might say of my activities as an artist. 

Time passes, the stakes change, ten plus years into sobriety I’d like to believe I have grown. Discipline comes into the practice, not the discipline to be in the studio (that has always been there) but the discipline to follow an idea through, to focus and develop bodies of work that have a coherence…a conceptual framework if you like. That said, some things remain the same – I am a studio artist, it’s where I want to be, I want to make things, I want to see them grow and develop before my eyes. I need to see it before I know what it is, before I can dissect it, understand it, explain it, and finally – present to the outside world. As always, for me at least, the meaning emerges through the making.

Much of this earlier work has been lost over the years, callously discarded by me, lost during studio moves, the vagaries of life. But enough remains and despite my initial resistance it has been revealing to look back and perhaps even consider what I might take forward. I am in no way finished with what I am doing now, there is much ground still to cover, but who knows what threads from the past – in whatever new form – may feed into future works. Earlier this year I wrote something in my sketchbook without much thought or consideration for what it might mean…

‘Bring back the lurid, the obscene, the grotesque, the darkly humorous, absurd     elements into the work. Keep the beauty, the craft, the technique – in both drawing and painting, but consider process, the unfinished, the ‘happy accident.’ To consider – how does the oil painting skill I have acquired influence and integrate with the above?’

There is a question here that I don’t have an answer for right now, but who knows what will come…or when? But perhaps, looking back, there is some food for thought in ‘This Weird Soup.’