Interface.

Interface. oil on paper on board. 100x68cm.

The capacity of some paintings to connect with our physical memory of spaces and objects allows us to respond to something out there: something which is also inside us; what a friend of mine calls wholeness. It is the immediacy of the visual world which allows this so poignantly, that resonates enough to register a start of recognition. There in our memory is that place, that moment , one we may have long forgotten or if not forgotten, recognized as lying fallow, distant, hidden beneath layers of our daily concerns and conflicts but waiting, waiting to reconnect.
Merleau-Ponty, writing of Cezanne, says that the artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most of us take part without really seeing it and it was he, Cezanne, who wanted to make visible how the world touches us.


Francis Ponge , writing in 1947 of La Cruche.

The singularity of the jug is thus to be at once ordinary and delicate: so in some way precious. And the difficulty, involved in its very being, is that one must -for that is also its character- make use of it every day. We have to grasp the ordinary object (a simple intermediary, of little value) place it in daylight, handle it, set it in motion, clean, fill, empty.


Memory and the everyday, an interface between where we are and where we and others have been. It seems a fit a subject for painting, something to address, something which can be overlooked and yet which has infinite richness.