Spotlight On: The Original Textured White Abstract
How often can an artist trace their career trajectory back to one single artwork? One piece that defined their path, completely clarified their artistic voice which until that point had been unfocused and plagued by everyone else’s ideas, thoughts and opinions. I don’t know the answer. I know a lot of other artists, and we all find our way with different approaches and on varying time scales, but this is my story and it all hinges around this one piece.
This is the only photo of the artwork that still exists. At the time I didn’t realise its importance or the significance of what it would become. I wish I had. I wish I had taken more photos, and kept the original piece, but perhaps the starting point is less important than the journey it led me on.
At the time I created it, I was around 22 years old. I had been been selling my art sporadically for a couple of years, but I had no clear style or idea about what I wanted to make. Some of my paintings were landscapes, a few were abstracts, cityscapes, portraits and animals. A little bit of everything really. When I saw something that took my fancy I had a go at it, or when I had an idea in the middle of the night, or when I saw what someone else had made I tried a variation of it. They were all nice pieces, and although the subjects varied, there was obvious thematic links between the colour and most importantly in the fact that even from the very first piece, every single one incorporated textural elements. It was an instinctive thing to me and not something I examined too closely. I just really disliked the thought of a flat smooth canvas, and so I tried all manner of texture; bead gels, sand, paper, feathers, petals, leaves, stones, mica, gravel, shells.
I tried texture paste too, and I immediately dismissed all previous materials, for it scratched at an itch I wasn’t aware I had. Now my artwork started to have a bit more cohesion to it, the flowers, portraits and cities were created with texture paste. My family liked them, my friends liked them, people who saw them liked them enough to buy them. Yet still I felt empty, still I felt I was chasing an elusive shadow I could never catch. I couldn’t understand why it just wouldn’t ‘fit’. I’ve made art for as long as I’ve been old enough to remember. It always made me happy, I always dreamed of making art for my career, why now did the pieces not fit anymore?
It may have been this sadness, this unmooring, that finally cracked my shell, I’m not sure, but one day I sat with a blank canvas, the texture paste and palette knife and nothing else. I did no planning, no sketching or researching. I remember clearly, sitting on the wood floor in a ray of sun, alone with the materials and just forming the texture paste as it needed to be formed. I followed instinct and didn’t question it, didn’t think about it. I just had an urge, as I sat under that shaft of light, to create forms that would be the subject themselves. They would throw the shadows, cast highlights, and require no clever paintwork or illusions, just be finished with pure white when the texture paste dried.
As I laid my tools down at the end of the day, I knew I had finally found what I had been desperately looking for. The answer to the questions I had been asking of everyone else, that I had been smothering within myself, had been allowed to come forth. It was always there, I just didn’t see, I didn’t listen. The texture, from that first painting, was my strongest urge, and I hadn’t questioned why. Why? Because it was my voice! There all along. Organic textural forms. I could see it all now, like the blinkers had been taken down.
My family, my friends, my previous customers didn’t understand the piece. Why’s it all white? Why is there no subject? I explained, they still didn’t understand, but it was okay, I knew this was my path now and it would take time. In fact it took three years for that original white textured abstract to sell, at which point I made another in a different size and style with plaster instead of texture paste, which would become Omega the foundation of my Origins series and is the reason it is named such. I’ve created over 50 custom commissions of Omega since then, in a variety of shapes and sizes that have been shipped throughout the world. I have gone on to develop my texture plaster technique over the last 13 years to be able to sculpt textures, figures and created two more collections. It has become my distinctive style that not a week goes by I’m not asked about by a new or exploring artist. It is my voice by which I express my creative soul, my connection to the natural world and its influence upon me, and it all began sitting in a sunbeam with a 12x24 canvas.
