My experience with oil paint as a medium to produce the portrait began with an emphasis on drawing to achieve likeness, and in using oils to model that likeness in colour. This exhibition however challenges that process of mainly predetermined outcomes driven by drawing, and places the focus on the media of oil paint. When looking at my work it is easy to dismiss it for its apparent lack of drawing but within the cyclic process of constructing and deconstructing an image, drawing is always present, imbedded in and on the gestural applications of oil. Drawing has to somehow co-exist within the gesture, and within the paint, challenging our perception of what a portrait should look like.
These are mainly self-portraits. As a painter I have a great love of oils as a medium. It is a sensual and provocative medium, offering its fragrance, its gooeyness, it freshness and its immediacy to me as an artist. These works put me in my world of paint and remind me of the sensory experience involv
