The why and what

I have always been fascinated by art that changes the way we see something familiar.

I suspect that fascination began long before I had the words for it. Looking back, it has quietly shaped almost everything I have ever made, from commercial creativity to drawing and painting.

I have never been interested in novelty for its own sake. What interests me is finding a form that reveals something already present: a feeling, a tension, a relationship or an idea that becomes obvious only once it has been seen in a different way.

That is where most of my work begins.

I have also become equally fascinated by the way works of art relate to one another.

Some ideas seem too large to resolve within a single image. They need another work alongside them, one that completes, questions or reframes what came before. Often the meaning does not sit inside either piece individually, but in the conversation between them.

That is probably why so much of my work takes the form of diptychs and triptychs. I enjoy the moment when one image changes the way another is understood.

The how, the process

There is always a start point of some sort, a sketch in my journal, a bit of writing, a podcast. There is no real system per se, but one of my latest triptychs, ‘We bend, not break.’ below, will give you a flavour:

I was inspired by Oxford colleague Athol Williams’s poems (the first ever Business School Poet Laureate), and also by a loose idea about how people endure difficult times. I had been thinking about the particular pressures facing the United States on its 250 birthday, and about the possibility that it would eventually find a way through them. I also knew, as I often do, I wanted to draw a set, a triptych.

That was the starting point, but it was not a plan.

I did not know what the work would look like when I began. As I always do, I just started drawing, then stopped, looked, added something, took something away, changed the balance, kept going. I deepened the roots of the trees in length and texture, added the leaves to the sunscape and before the tree on the first one (I had I feeling I wanted them not to be alone), then added a reflection of the sun in the ground, this didn’t really make logical sense but it made it feel balanced and it felt right because I felt the sun needed roots too. Then lastly, some clouds, again, because it felt like something was missing.

The details aren’t important but the process is: at every point, the work was telling me something, the challenge was to remain open enough to hear it. That’s how I always work, I hope it is what makes the art that emerges as interesting to me as it is to those who appreciate it out there in the real world.