between past and future pleasure

When you make your first discoveries with paint, it’s likely that you will be using tempera block paints. The economy of choice is liberating and if you have cool and warm versions of the primaries, mixing is easy. But when the colours dry they change – so every stage is a slow reveal. Layers disturb one another so you have to find ways around that too. The paint is gently defiant – like working through a veil. Using it is like trying to get a memory to coalesce.

This is a series of paintings based on photographs I’ve taken over the years. The photographs are a record of the quiet poetic spaces that tend to catch our eye – even while we attempt the grand business of living with purpose with the people we love. They are like a pulse beating behind the action and somehow, more than a grinning selfie could, they come to stand for the moment.

As they accumulate and I look over them I know the depth of significance that they have for me – and I know too how freely they will slip away from it. They are paintings of light and bubbles and water vapour and air. The stories will vanish but it’s possible that the quiet space in them will continue to resonate.

The title comes from a quote from F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night;

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy-one of those uneventful times that at the moment seem to be only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

: Hampton Court

: Hampton Court

: Teignmouth to Dartmouth 2024

: Painting from a restaurant in Mount Abu Rajasthan where Art Deco meets kitsch meets Indian opulence.

: A bedroom painted in the vivid blue of Jodhpur city with patterned red and brown blankets and cushions folded and piled on the bed in contrast to the black and white geometry of the marble floor tiles.

: The view from the cool blue interior of an Indian train to Jaisalmer out onto the golden Rajasthani desert landscape as it rushes by as a blur.

: This boat standing in an area of swamp by the Thames, has been converted as a home and carefully patched with sheet aluminium giving it the appearance of a kintsugi repair.