Figure Paintings

On Presence

A figure appears again and again. It stands in yellow fields beneath storm-dark skies, moves through forests where trees twist like flames, occupies stages framed by heavy curtains, or faces monolithic forms that dwarf its small body. Sometimes it is painted in warm flesh tones, sometimes in spectral white, sometimes in saturated red. Its features are never resolved. It stands. It does not gesture dramatically, does not collapse, does not triumph.

The figures have no faces. Where my self-portraits return to the face as a contested site of recognition, these paintings shift the question to the body in space: posture, weight, colour, the fact of standing. A face would pull attention toward identity, expression, psychology. These paintings ask something simpler and more difficult: someone is here.

Many of the environments began as earlier paintings, canvases that already existed with their own marks, failures, and unresolved passages, some still visible beneath or beside the figure. The figure enters late, and what happens at that meeting is not decided in advance. Sometimes the result reads as tension, sometimes as an unlikely harmony, sometimes as a third thing with no settled name. There is a broader condition in this. We also arrive into circumstances we did not make, and do not get to remake from nothing. The question is what happens at the meeting, and whether it can be looked at honestly.

My studio is less a chapel than a workshop. Canvases lean against the walls in different states of finish, and the same figure is brought out and set against a new ground, not because the last attempt failed but because the next one has not been tried yet. Producing many paintings, steadily, is how the looking gets done. The surfaces vary with each encounter, from thin, stained passages where the canvas weave shows through to denser areas where the figure has been built up and painted over. The titles, Ready, Searching, Storm, Into the Woods, Green Shoes Animal Head, read less like a story than like a record kept of separate visits.

The paintings are small, closer to something that might hang in a hallway or above a desk than anything built for a public wall. This is deliberate. Endurance gets photographed well; resilience has a market; a monumental figure still standing becomes, very easily, a monument. These paintings stay small enough to live alongside, easy to walk past, easy to stop noticing, which is closer to how precarity is actually lived: low-grade, constant, absorbed into the texture of a room. They do not ask to matter more than a hallway painting matters.

The figure does not narrate any of this as survival or hardship overcome. It does not ask to be read as brave. It only stands. The figure is here. The paint is here. The rest is still open.