About

This blog is based on experiences or occurrences that I have observed: in my studio practice as an artist, in experimental sessions that I have worked together on with students, and institutional or cultural events. Because I am a painter this site operates as part of my practice based research. The discourse in this blog is therefore centred on painting.

Although based on painting, the template or approach is based on the concept of collage and drawing. In this sense this project focuses on the convergent local where other disciplines come in to play from the starting point of painting.
It means, on the one hand, that the limits of painting can be explored, around its heritage. It also means that the exploration of painting can offer propositions for other lines on inquiry through appropriate media.
This comes from what has happened in my own studio practice and in sessions with students; the experimental, is the place where art happens.

This space serves as an evaluation/orienting point and reflects aspects of research as practice. The use of the term ‘kinetic’ in relation to ‘painting’ concerns the mobility of paintings heritage in its ability to withstand the currents of discourse that wants to herald its demise.
Kinetic painting relates to the ability of painting to acclimatise itself by embracing critical practices that seem to need to make painting redundant in order to promote a chosen medium.
I bought a book on video art recently and on the back is a statement by Nam June Paik:

‘just as collage has ousted oil painting, so the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas’

I thought about a painting that I did that considers this kind of idea. I painted onto a sheet of glass using household paint, a TFT screen was stuck on the back of the glass, showing a video loop through the painting.  This represented a breakthrough in my practise from a formal point of view, and it represents a strand of work that I am continuing to investigate in my studio that is similar to my initiating this blog as a project.

Solarised Carbon (kinetic painting), 2007, glass , household paint, TFT screen, coaxial cable, DVD, 110 x 140cm

You don’t have to look far to see that there is a lot of jostling for position in current discourse concerning art, Bruno Latour might call it an Iconoclash, Its all about subverting other mediums to promote a preferred one. I find it far more interesting to reconcile the proliferation of media and approaches as they present themselves to us now, form the domain of a chosen discipline.
Rene Magrette preferred to be called a thinker who communicated by paint. There is plenty to still think about in the act of painting; in particular, through practice as research.
The experimental space is a place to find if you have exhausted your capacities in a chosen medium. To explore a different one in order to feedback into a preferred field, or as a point of departure. This blog doesn’t try to propose this space wholesale, but tries to identify it through a series of practices. It does, however propose, as a practice in of itself; a research space.