Don't forget utopia -
Ideals and idylls

I’m drawn to images that have changed hands, in particular those that reflect personal symbolisms, such as souvenirs and postcards. As images and objects, there is an interesting conflict between intention and reality – prolonging memories and maintaining attachments to places is only viable for as long as we are, before becoming the ephemera of auction sites and direct connection to the subject matter becomes once-removed.

Images that in a generic sense hold a place in the popular subconscious have at times given my work what I hope is a sense of commonality. Shared things whose collectability endures despite (or because of) being defunct and without context, kitsch ephemera can reflect the elliptical orbit of painting itself around the zeitgeist.

I think artists can be suspicious of nostalgia but a sense of memory and permanence for what is no longer attainable isn’t automatically romantic or naïve, or retrograde. You can revisit places but times are more elusive. I think it’s ok to look back and to consider how ideas about modernity and even ‘the future’ have changed. It also speaks about former promises, optimisms of the past that hindsight might reappraise.

I’m particularly interested in architectural phenomena like socialist modernist hotels in the former Yugoslavia – ideological idylls many of which have been erased by the sheen of privatisation. Brochures and postcards are where these structures are catalogued in a half-imagined heyday. The synthesised skies and skin tones expressed in halftone print create space for painting to explore what’s really ideal or idyllic and what’s simply false.

I’m intrigued by the falseness that optimistic kitsch references instil at the outset of a painting, freeing the process to sustain and enhance that deception by venturing further into the abstract and the imagined. Painting has a voice in discussing how people retain a time and place in the memory.

I enjoy looking at paintings, particularly where the viewer is left to wander in thought. As a painter, I am fixated with the material properties of paint and surface. Making shapes, marks and patterns amidst layers of material is the same thrill now that it was when I was a student. I share a studio with my two young daughters and, when I struggle to find the colour and playfulness I’m looking for, their projects are a reminder of the sense of adventure in picture-making.

Surfaces are grounds for adventure in painting, and I try to envisage landscapes as places at a time of change or optimism, somewhere you can go but imagined or pictured at a time that is, for all intents and purposes, lost.