indeed amusing to come here today to
talk about movement when you’re in
urgent need of double knee surgery and
you’ve have enormous pain in my back and
I’m having to sit down and you might ask
what can I don’t fuck like this really
have to say about movement perhaps this
morning we’ll get an all-way piece organ
recycle well when I was invited to come
here and give it a short talk about on
the theme of movement my read media
reaction was absolutely not just over a
decade ago I was shortlisted for a
visual arts award and I was working in
New York and on the flight over to the
ceremony in London I’ve tried to work
out what I would say if I won and I
remembered a quotation I’d read in a
thriller about the shenanigans in the
art world attributed to the great French
painter re Matisse and and it was did it
was my speech and Matisse said all
painters should have their tongues cut
out but but this brief talk is about
movement
it’s not about painting because it is
movement that has given my life
direction in fact it’s driven my life in
the last four decades I’ve moved to
various locations in England in Italy
and tried to fuse the notion of the
glance and the gaze
for the visual artist the glance is
essentially an oriental idea
an oriental concept we glance at our
surroundings as we move through them and
the gaze a Western idea we contemplate a
view of our surroundings and we reflect
on it the stasis gives us an ability to
ponder over a span of 40 years many
ideas affect you and it is difficult if
possible probably not to be affected by
selective amnesia but the one constant
theme of a seeming insoluble paradox is
the contradictory forces that have tried
to fuse the theme persists today how can
you make imagery by hand brain
coordination that might have a weight
gravities and yet movement on a
three-dimensional object a board or a
canvas with two by two dimensional
imagery an organization of abstract
markings that first signify to yourself
and then possibly another and then if
you’re really lucky others over the last
50 years
surely the use of photography filmmaking
and video by mechanical devices would
convey and have conveyed this sense of
movement much better yet from my
idiosyncratic perspective the
coordination of moving glancing and
gazing at the image in a particular
location engages me completely and use
it because hands is the perfect way to
proceed in fact
it’s an absolute necessity forty years
ago as a vessel artists who tried to
make landscape painting in a European
tradition it’d be clay came clear then
as it remains now decades later that it
was pointless meaningless futile to try
and would not perpetuate this tradition
but since I was first aware as a
teenager I’ve been fascinated indeed
obsessed with Japanese Zen calligraphy
particularly the 18th century
calligraphers same guy and tiger and at
the same time obsessed with the European
tradition of Rubens Ann Drysdale can ink
turner and constable etc I revere these
traditions and I love their artists so
how to fuse these ideas into something
that has meaning for me in 1978 I was
living in a remote Pennine Borland
village in North East Lancashire I
stopped using chromatic material oil
paint watercolors etc and I destroyed
everything I called prior to this date
this was the point of my departure I
began walking each day around this
village taking with me small blocks of
a4 size and a5 size that’s postcard size
acid-free paper I began making rapid
images with a pencil and went with
pencil and graphite as I walked I
glanced and gazed and at speed this
happened every day and soon it was clear
I had ritualized these walks
each was circular of a varying length
and took place each afternoon every
afternoon
at the same time I walked I glanced and
against building up literally hundreds
indeed thousands of images destroying or
editing images when I felt they meant
nothing
trees woods cops farmhouses bounce paths
stretches of moorland the weather the
seasons they all became familiars
through this minimalistic repetition of
glancing and gazing and moving and drawn
because I’d thrown out oil paint canvas
etc I started working only with black
and white material on the individual
drawings each evening I used black ink
reinforced with shellac which is a
lustrous varnish which used to be made
out of the crushed exoskeletons of
insects it’s the same material that they
used to make the 78 vinyl records in the
40s 50s and 60s Elvis Presley records
this gave the ink a density a body a
durability and the permanence to me it
was a new form of painting but with
mopping pens instead of brushes these
images were all individually mounted on
boards and then pinned all around the
walls of the cottage I lived in after
three years I suddenly saw the hundreds
of a4 and a5 images as multiple records
of time and movement fused with stasis
and contemplation a Eureka moment the
tessellated grids of images mine evenly
worked with the dense marks made with
mapping pens had turned into a visual
diary a non verbal record
of my traces of my walking so they are
no longer pinned individually they’re
assembled into Greece into tessellated
groups a mosaic of imagery some would
contain a hundred images 72 in which is
50 images and so on after 10 years I
moved away and I lived in four other
locations in England and two in Italy
with two other brief periods of intense
activity in Provence in France and in
Venice nine years ago I finally arrived
in North Norfolk by the North Sea the
walk I started making is linear along a
shingle strand to Blakeney Point which
is a remote wildlife sanctuary at the
most easterly point of England it
spirals out into the sea next memo Haven
once again I’ve made thousands of rapid
glance drawings in small books this time
always on the same day at the same time
once a week everything is still black
and white I use belt black water-soluble
felt pens and soft black water-soluble
crayons and the water I used of course
use is seawater which is to hunt the
rest of the week I used these huge
compost this huge compost of imagery to
attempt to wrench a perfect image image
of the sea the sea a perfect armature
for constant movement and change and the
long large paintings I work on through
the week in the studio their gaze
depicting nothing and everything this is
a walk into infinity leaving a concrete
image
behind that is the ambition of pursuit
single-mindedly down the years to fuse
these two opposites and capture the
moment frozen and melting at the same
time in our possession I want so very
much to continue to pursue operations
allowing I’ll end with a half-remembered
favorite quotation from the great French
19th century painter Eugene dellacroix
dellacroix said it should be possible to
capture a man in a drawing completely as
he falls from the fifth floor window to
the ground there glance producing the
object of the gaze in a wholly inventive
way that I guess is the ambition I’ve
been pursuing all my life thank you [Applause]