This work represents my questioning of painting and my love-hate relationship with it. It consists of recent paintings in nail enamel over paintings from my early career, around 2002. The main body of work from that time were paintings in house paint on transparent acrylic sheet, and their subject was women I admired at the time, my own personal cannon, their names inscribed in inscrutable alphabets of colour which, like the way I painted them, was strictly systematic. The result was a series of hard-edged abstract compositions, based on the shape of the support and the number of letters in the name of the woman. Later I also rendered texts in these private colour languages. 

Over-painting with a contingent and cosmetic material like nail enamel has been a process of revisiting and questioning my early practice and its rationales as it relates to where I am now: twenty years into it and wondering why. I have not resolved what or why these paintings are, but they are part of the process of continuing an art practice and its languages.

Through these works I have learned that I am not over painting. Painting as a mode has rightly come in for criticism from various quarters (including in my own mind) as suspect on the grounds of commodification. If you’ve ever been to a major art fair or looked at the ad buys in the big art mags it’s not a hard complaint to make. But after a number of years having made the conscious decision to position my work outside of painting, in effect criticising it as a form, I have learned that painting itself is not the enemy. It is instead, as Helen Johnson puts in Painting is a Critical Form, a mode of enquiry that, at its best, rightly belongs to be thought of as part of philosophical enquiry, as a manifestation of critical thought that opens itself and those it possesses to endless possibilities. It is a mystery that is never solved and to me this is joyful and challenging, a site of productive wonderment.

The ‘new’ paintings were slow to come; the nail enamel as a material that was their generating force: a form of colour as a found object, a consumer item encountered in bargain bins in pharmacies, garish and bland bunged together. Implied gestural abstraction by accident. Found objects, ordinary objects co-opted into art have always been exciting to me. My stepdad worked in a paint depot and he would give me all the thousands of paint swatches when the company decided it was time for new ones. Thousands of promises that the names of the paints+the colours themselves would deliver the ideal of those colours to consumers who wished to surround themselves in their domestic setting with their magic, talismans against domestic strife. (It didn’t work for me either.) 

The idea of paint as a found object has it origins with Duchamp, whose last painting Tu m’ (1918) I was lucky enough to encounter in my travels (it is at the Yale University Art Museum) suggests a generative machine which has colour swatches disappearing into infinity (also a bottle brush sticking out of it, I guess Duchamp was over painting too). When I Google the painting to refresh my idea for writing this what struck me was the mismatch between the description of the painting in the words on the Yale website and the image of the work. There is absolutely no mention of the colours. Which is strange, considering they are the backbone of its composition. But also not unusual in the description of painting where colour is routinely taken for granted or considered to be equivalent to paint.