Change

First posted: July 2017

I’ve always been very easily distracted, particularly when confronted by mundane or laborious tasks. A clear-out of the loft will always be interrupted for an hour or so when I stumble across a stash of random photos from my college days or a box of my teenage mix-tapes .

(I don’t do many clear-outs, which is why I still have boxes of mix tapes from 25 years ago, although at some point I must have cleared out my one and only tape player).

This propensity for procrastination has been in full effect today, as a forthcoming studio visit from a new collector meant that a serious sort out of my miniscule studio space could not be put off any longer.

I shuffled some invoices from one shelf to another and matched some dried-out lids to some drying-out paint before my true nature asserted itself and two happy hours were spent sifting through the racks of my back-catalogue, locating the best (and worst) of the unsold output from the past twenty years, as my studio filled up with biodegrading bubble wrap and decrepit packing tape.

It’s odd how some work just never sees the light of day; timing and circumstance means that it simply never gets shown. Not everything makes it onto a wall or even onto a website (these days, of course, it would at least get a thorough airing on Instagram), and this recent trip down memory-lane was an eye-opener, as two whole series’ of 10-year-old pictures were viewed with a fresh eye.

Stylistically, they are obviously things that I’ve made – the technique, colours and finish are not so very different from my work today - but they seem like unusually diverse diversions from my path of development.

One series is very closely based on London street maps; I even found the maps that they were based on. One of the maps – picked at random 12 years ago, based purely on how much I liked the way the streets were laid out – includes the road that I live on now in far-East London. A very pleasing coincidence, although I couldn’t find a painting where it actually features.

Certain aspects of each series have stayed the course and remain part of my repertoire, but these 10 or 12 paintings are out there (in here) on their own and I like them all the more for that.