pedestriana (18.5)
mixed media on wood; 90 x 120cm; 1997
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It doesn't matter that the television's on the blink again. I never liked the way films finish anyway and it did show me a way to make figurative paintings with some of the advantages of all-over abstraction. Always having to have the foreground at the bottom of the picture was beginning to get on my nerves.

Here's a narrative painting with no characters and no story, with an end, a couple of beginnings and a middle at the end.

People's propensity to find figures in flames, figurative images in exclusively abstract patterns is reversed in these pictures. The audience is presented with a formalist abstract composition made of rigidly figurative elements. These figures replace the brush strokes, gestures or shapes of colour and tone that might make an abstract painting. Despite the semi deliberate attempt to suppress them, human relationships and sub narratives prove irrepressible.