Lifters and Leaners

My drawing practice is based on the media for stimulus and effect. Without media coverage, comment and analysis I wouldn’t make the art I make. The major themes in my drawing: War, Globalisation, Politics, The Environment are all themes which dramatically rehearse the basic question of human justice and injustice. My connection to these themes occurs through the mediums of television, Internet, radio and newspapers.

These themes and my engagement with them through media has been the bedrock of my practice over the past decade

As an artist I intentionally leave myself open to a wide range of influences. Though focussed on the specific themes of War, power and globalisation. I am committed in my work to a process of accumulation; this accumulation of words and imagery has been stored and catalogued in folders through scanning news stories on the Internet and various international publications and journals. Part of my working day studio methodology is to read the latest news stories and there associated photographic imagery and to cut out the images that most excite or disturb me and then by drawing them, re-process their meaning and content sometimes turning them into dis-information, skewering there meaning, making them ambiguous perhaps. I like to draw from monochrome photographs and render them in black ink so they retain a graphic searing quality. At other times I draw straight from the computer screen or from photographs in books.

At times the drawing process becomes a stream of consciousness. For example I will be listening to The Religion Report on radio National and write or draw stories and headlines in a random way piling them onto the page. Because of the way I work, on horizontal rolls of paper, the images become ‘grabs of information’ or re-processed imagery that act as diarist chronicles of world news. These chronicles are imbued with my emotional and psychological thoughts, therefore creating a more directly human aspect to the completed drawing.