People often ask me what my paintings “mean,” and I, being an abstract painter with a classical name and a mild allergy to literalism, tend to answer with something like: “They mean what they resist.” This is a maddening response, I know. But abstraction is not there to comfort. It is there to interrupt.
I mainly work in a converted grain warehouse in Suffolk, where the light is sincere and unflattering. The walls are honest brick, and my studio is arranged according to no system I could explain to a rational adult: sketches on the ceiling, pigment samples tacked to the floor, one chair, and a radio tuned to a station I never enjoy. Clarity is the enemy of invention.
My recent series, “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather”, emerged during a particularly stormy winter. I began drawing rectangles—not the stoic, self-satisfied kind you find in mid-century modernism, but indecisive ones, collapsing at the corners, leaning into themselves. Colour came later: bruised yellows, bureaucratic greens, a red stolen from a 1950s Railway waiting room. These were not shapes of certainty. They were blueprints for internal architecture—plans for buildings that might be emotional, or possibly uninhabitable.
My influences shift constantly, as all good theft should. Agnes Martin, for her rigor and restraint; Malevich, for his audacity; and Etel Adnan, for showing that abstraction can be a kind of love letter to a mountain. I admire artists who understand that silence can be structural, and colour can argue without shouting.
People assume abstraction is cerebral, even cold. But for me, it is the most emotional form. When I paint, I am not making a statement—I am releasing one. Sometimes sadness arrives as a smear, sometimes as a crisp diagonal. I don’t always know which until months later, when someone else names it for me.
I don’t paint when I’m happy. I rearrange furniture or cook something unnecessarily elaborate. Happiness is circular, self-sufficient. It doesn’t need translating. Sadness, however, requires a syntax.
There is a kind of reluctant pleasure in the attention my work has lately received. The pieces I once stored in cupboards—because I didn’t trust them, or myself—now hang in galleries with proper lighting and clean floors. Critics write about my “rigorous emotional minimalism” and “subtle architectural unease.”
Fame, if we can call it that, is a peculiar byproduct. I don’t dislike it, but it’s like receiving applause for something you said in a whisper to yourself three years ago. Still, I’m grateful. Not for the recognition per se, but for the fact that people are willing to spend time with something that doesn’t give answers. That feels rare now.
And so, I continue—drawing uncertain lines in precise configurations, layering colour until it loses its first language, and trying, always, to build a space that holds a feeling without describing it.
(Selected works from “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather” will be on display at Pimlico Wilde Central later in the year.)