Water Tower (2005)
I have spent the last decade living in Istanbul, Turkey. Recent work emerges out of a global consciousness and my current nomadic state, as a citizen of South Africa, resident of Istanbul, artist, and traveler moving between media and between countries.
In Istanbul, I have continued my exploration of urban environments and the very citiness of cities through the media of painting, drawing, performance and video.
My drawing books register the mobility of my perceptions, documenting a life lived in the city in the spirit of the French Situationists, who believed that cities are historical and emotional landscapes to be explored on foot.
The large paintings become palimpsests of an urban adventure. Some are layered, jazz like, full of repeated riffs, erasures and reappearances; you can never hide something completely: it stays in the surface giving it life.
The paintings skirt abstraction, suggesting rather than describing.
In the new work inspired by the Bosphorous, I attempt to evoke the numinous moment, caught in a net of light, or a ship spun from its mists. I also recognize the grinding presence of the construction crane momentarily birdlike above the colourful bulk of an incoming freighter. Something ominous can be rendered playful and something prosaic can become a thing of beauty.
I always like where my brushmark meets nothingness, worked areas of color abutting and spooling away into untouched canvas. Sometimes I hold onto that emptiness; that alive possibility for a long as I can, till completion; other times it disappears, or is framed as a shape; a ship; a figure.
Work on show
Buyukdere 35 Gallery, Bogazkesen Cadessi, Beyoglu, IstanbulHenry George Gallery, Parkhurst, Johannesburg, South Africa