Phosphorescent light bubbling up from a cobalt lake, luminous yellow forms in a field of cadmium, a mossy riverbed draped in matte red paint. Each painting in this body of work hovers between the imagined and the material. It builds on the artist’s interest in the metaphor of the painted surface as a reflective pond, however, in these works the water is not still and deep: it moves. The works hold a delicate memory in a hazy suspension of dots, ready to be swept away by the wind or water in an instant.
The exhibition takes its name from the title of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir. She tells the story of her life as a breathless stream of events in which she floats along in the slipstream of greater forces. The title resonated with the artist as it reflected both the method of making and the content of the works which are a filtered response to the plethora of images coursing through the artist’s mind.
Rhythm and intuition drives the paintings as the artist continuously responds to the last mark laid. In a process of deferral, layers of pigment and areas of colour are built up only to be dragged back over each other with sandpaper. Glazes make ripples out of the muddied paint, echoing the ripples of the wood grain beneath. The final image emerges in the difference between the murky background and the intense saturation of the foreground, the dabs of coloured highlights indicating light that will immediately shift.
It is the slipstream of visual information that the artist draws on to make the paintings: they are a response to the contemporary context of the work, the history of painting and memories of fabric, patterns and landscapes. The yellow dots on “Chilli Oil” are the glints of light on a Velazquez or Titian whilst the cadmium red against the duller mauve recall the monotone richness of a flocked damask fabric. The luminous yellow of ”Gatorade” is the toxic sky of Derek Jarman’s film “Road to Avebury”. The intense blues and floral motif of “Copper Sulphate” are as much from Monet’s Waterlilies as they are from Designer’s Guild fabric patterns of the Noughties. Whilst the ever shifting pinks and reds of “Tender” are similarly drawn as much from the work of Bonnard and Vuillard as from samples of liberty print fabric and memories of wooded landscapes at dusk. There is no one source more valuable or necessary and as the paintings are made each appears and shifts with the layers of paint just as memories appear and are replaced with new ones.
These paintings are open, investigative and tender, they offer no conclusions or concreteness, but are a fragment of remembered time, that will, unless it’s painted, be swept away.