What is the salmon complx?
colourScapes is exploring space within
The Salmon Complx. This is the phrase i give to my human condition of seeking to understand myselve by peering back to make sense of my childhood. I realised as i did this that i began by doing a lot of what i did as a child. why a complx? i tried to paint again like i did as a child.without judging myself. excited by the mark i made. painting also allowed me time to think about my childhood to let me be free of it in a way free to make a new mark. i felt that going back searching for how i painted then, i took new energy into my life from the experience. this made me think a lot about how we are shaped by the child hood we grow up in. in starting to paint again i have rediscovered a part of myself that i use to shape the world i live in now. maybe the salmon complx is really using the creative expressive part of oneself, in however that is for one. I think of this as a positive thing to do. this is also a continuous cycle because it is easy to forget the mindset of being curious to explore and so like Salmon we have to return over and over to re capture our creative force within.
I have not studied or trained in an art college. I am an outsider which is how i have always felt
barcelona, spain
In 2015 i exhibited a series of photomontage i had created by blu taking them to walls and buildings in Spain. I handed out magnifying glasses to people passing by to allow them to look at them close up but also to break the habit of how we look at image through screens. I realised as i watched people peer at them how much i preferred to show this way. To watch people react allowed me to understand what i was doing in a very different way.
rissani, morocco
midday midnight
london
feetabout began after i lived in australia for a year picking fruit.i was living in cornwall and watched a programme on aboriginal art. in one painting you could see 3 different tracks of animals laid down over the hills,except you were high above the ground looking down. if you took a time lapse photograph from above looking down on the land, then instead of taking out one image to show the form why not layer them all on top of each other so that the fragments of time where composed into form.
i had also visited the Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective in 2000 at the royal festival hall in london. i remember people saying you didn't have to crop his images his composition was so good. i kept wanting to see just beyond the frame. what lay there?
in 2009 received my first mobile work phone and it had a camera (Nokia 6633) i experimented with the camera fascinated with somehow capturing the space i stood in for that brief moment
i spent 6yrs taking feetabouts until i exhibited on the streets of Spain in 2015 and realised i had said all i needed to say.
it took me a year to work out i wanted to paint
bakerloo underpass
early feetabout 2010 Nokia 6633
rissani, morocco
In 2016 i decided to begin to paint again. I went to Morocco and wandered out to the desert towns and began painting on the streets. I wanted to be exposed outdoors so i was forced to accept the mark i was making. much of our creative endevours are destroyed before we begin by the critical inner voice that says we are not good enough. i want to quieten that voice and found street painting critical in accepting what i was painting as a step along to my next painting.
