“Titian is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias; one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand that to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion” These words were written by Eugène Delacroix in 1857. He identifies significant tenet for abstract painters, today: namely the role of gesture. I believe a painter should not be controlled by the reflexive in their work, but dig further to find the mystery of truth. The reflexive approach is -ironically, for all its trappings of authenticity - an acknowledgment pf conceptual understanding and is even a form of manoeuvring to circumvent facing up to conscious decision-making (this has always been associated with “picture-making”, an academic configuring of pictorial elements leading to an overt composition). It can be agreed that all art making is a product of conscious decision-making, but all decision making has an optimum state of occurrence determined by the appropriate speed of action. I always ask myself: can there be a greater degree of control in the moment between between the thought and the deed? An artist has to really own the time between the impulse and the action, making it more elastic and flexible. This is the moment the abstract becomes the concrete (with the motivation to return the situation back into the abstract through the illusions of looking). If this time gets away from you, if it becomes an effect of “letting go” (often in the false notion of being spontaneous), or has a self awareness, there will be a distance that sets in which produces a generalised form of painting or a “mannered” one, as Delacroix says.
Matisse also talks of the importance of continually rekindling the moment of impulse and the maintenance of the initial emotion, time and again over the duration of the time required to complete the painting. The motivation for me in trying to make ambitious paintings the creation of “believable space”. Note: space, not as a recognised allusion to known three-dimensional, occupied space, but painting space - furnished as a condition of induced movement in the perception of the viewer. Such perceived movement is created through difference (Cézanne: “all lies in the contrast”.) Difference is generated by the attention given to all the concreteness available in the making of a painting - how significant the content can be. Everything is available: colour, texture, scale, opacity, line, stress, contrast and so on: a list which can be added to, regularly, as responses to the myriad visual states that paint can be conjured into. There is a key point here: such states should not be a parade of effects, but must be arrived at in response to the needs of the painting, as it unfolds. Ultimately everything must serve the colour, rather than misdirecting or diminishing it.