Conceptual Matters

As a child growing up, from an early age, the mile-long abandoned railway at the back of our family garden became a second home. There I lived and breathed its wild overgrown lands, year after year. There, in the heart of a vast city of London, I had what may as well have been the Amazonian rainforest at my fingertips. Or at least it seemed so through my young eyes.

Within the recesses of this overgrown land – with its sloping fruit trees, its extensive network of berry bushes, its dark, dank areas with frogs and newts underfoot, and its huge dragon flies – I found a partial sanctuary from the insanity of family life. On reflection, this is surely where my initial interest in all things to do with nature began. This fascination became further enhanced over the years through extensive travels: from the foothills of the Himalayas, to the summits of China’s Guilin mountains, to the rainforests of Brazil and to the sunken volcanoes of the Caribbean islands. Only recently have some of these sights begun to filter down into my work: most obviously with my hummingbirds which first mesmerised me in Brazil, then later in Grenada.

My great-grandfather was a naturalist in his own right, and to this day I still browse through the hundreds of nature articles he published over the years. Reading his comments, I understand what it truly means to admire and respect nature: and this comes through the simple process of being in nature, working in nature and observing nature.

Returning to fruit in my paintings is like returning to an innocent beginning. It is almost a rejection of the avant-garde, the conceptualist art, with all its importance laid on the idea rather than the aesthetic. The choice of subject was a stance: ‘I will find the humblest of source materials and make great art from it, as important as any conceptual work hanging in any White Cube.’ Well, that was the motivation.

A stance against conceptualism is, of course, doomed – as it is inescapably conceptual in itself! In fact, all art is conceptual to a degree. It becomes a question of extremes. There is a tipping-point where the concept becomes so perplexing that it becomes redundant to the general populace. I’m not here to confuse, perplex or challenge. There is unquestionably a place for this kind of intellectual stimulation. But that place is not part of my vision. Regardless of concepts in my work, the work has to do prcatically all of the talking and explaining itself.