Canvas Statement

My work is driven by a desire to exploit, document and display the natural behaviours of oil paint while imbuing the paint with some of the characteristics of aging. Creating smooth, youthful skins of paint, the surface created is smooth and rich with colour, supple and fresh. As time passes and with intervention, the paint skin undergoes unique behavioural processes, sometimes resulting in a heavily wrinkled, scarred and puckered surface that even years after conception continues to take on its final form.

Kitten Makes Art Statement

The Heroic Iconography of The Artist “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” Francis Bacon This collection of work displays an ongoing exploration of my childhood conception of ‘The Artist’- re-creating my childhood dreams of painting like all of the great male painters that I have studied, complete with poverty, misery, substance abuse and debauchery. But I’m not male, and the role of painting in the contemporary art world has evolved. Abstract expressionism plays a very different role in today's conceptually rich art world. I created the role of Kitten as a way of allowing me to explore where painting sits in the present day. Kitten is infatuated with the historical weight, associations and mystique of being a painter.