The Jerwood Drawing Prize

Opening Date: 2004-Sep-08
Closing Date: 2005-Jun-26
Two pencil drawings were shown in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004: 'A Strange Situation' and 'Romantic Inclinations'.
These works continue the questioning which has driven my work over the last ten years, a concern with what might be described as 'the artificial' in narrative art. My attempt is to make depictions of melodramatic situations which themselves stand in for what, in real life, might be seen as archetypal states. This idea relates to such views as that of Baudelaire, wrote this about landscape paintings in the Paris Salon of 1859: " I prefer backdrop paintings of the stage - favourite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision…things so completely false are, for that reason, much closer to the truth, precisely because they fail to lie."
During this period I have worked with drawing, painting and printmaking, moving from one means to another and carrying technical and pictorial discoveries and inventions between these different media. This remains a characteristic of my activity.