My whole way of working in ink on raw canvas started off with observations of the scraps of cotton or canvas that I used to mob up ink spills and blobs on the ink sketches I did of nudes and trees. After a while I realized that the ink stained bits of material, once straighten out, were at least as interesting as the series of sketches I was doing. As a result I started playing about more with different concentrations of black and blue ink, fascinated by the reaction with different types of material and the effect that is produced by the combination of ink with gouache and with diluted bleach. In the forms you can see tree trunks and branches and human figures at the point of appearance or disappearance – taking me back perhaps to those ink sketches and blobs that I’d been mopping up in the first place.
These then are some of my earliest ink paintings but it’s a theme I return to again and again. Particularly intriguing is the orange oxidation that often appears at the edges of the ink. Once you’ve done all your tests and experiments there is something both scary and exciting about trying to control these effects on a large scale.
