Studio time.

A whole lot of time and space seems to have elapsed since i’ve been in a studio. I’ve spent the last six months living in New York and London, a state of transience I’m not used to, but, as it turns out, it’s been a vital time for me to spend making paintings in my head.

I remember when I was at art school, I’d come in–religiously–on a Saturday (school was open most of the day on Saturday). One Saturday,I raced up the three flights of stairs to the third-year studios, fully intending to make a lot of work, but I ended up sitting, cleaning and reading. Riffling through sketches, looking at the work on the wall. I remember I was using thick, distressed paper. An old guy called Harry would make it himself in Kangaroo Valley and he’d come up to school to sell it to the students for a relative pittance. But it was indestructible stuff. Anyway, I was in a phase of abstract expressionism, there was a lot of paint, a lot of emotion–it was a serious endeavour, this soulful painting–and I decided to go get a coffee since I wasn’t being productive. I ran into the head of ceramics and she asked how I was going up there. I replied that I had done stuff all, and she said, ‘It’s just as important doing nothing in your studio. It’s studio time. It’s all important.’

And that has stayed with me ever since. So recently, as I’ve been making do with kitchen tables and living room floors to make my work (it’s been nothing special, sketches and studies in cramped scales), I’ve let go that pressure of having to make Big work. ‘Big’ as in ‘Big Painting’ work. ‘Big Art’. Nothing needs to be big, I’m learning.

Also this time away from making work in a sustained way has given me the pleasure of making work in my head. Really thinking the images through, thinking of titles (I hate thinking of titles. I dislike works and any linguistic association when it comes to painting, and I think the wall text is the greatest enemy of a painting), and thinking about how they would all hang together.

I naturally put pressure on myself–be it a timeline, or a work, or some gallery interaction. And that has been exacerbated by a) the end of my twenties and b) the end of the decade before 2020. It's probably all bullshit, and who cares, right?