Works on canvas

The black viscous honey, known as bitumen as I allowed it free rein and flow from the pendulum. I have never been able to repeat any of the patterns. Variables can be controlled but not dictated to.

2006 Gloss, Bitumen, Gesso 75x75cm.
From the Nobel prize winning work on the memory of water, to the magic of snowflakes, to the beauty of bubbles, few materials are as precious or so perfectly designed.
All it takes, is two hydrogen atoms joined to one oxygen, to create miracles.

2009 Gloss, Varnish, Pigment, Bitumen 160x160cm.
A personal chrysalis.

2005 Bitumen on Gesso 100x100cm.
Asymmetric and unstable in form compared to the painting of Carbon 12. Carbon 14 is a radioactive isotope, present in organic materials. Its presence allows us to time travel and date materials.

2005 Gloss and bitumen 50x50cm.
This was the very first of the ‘gravity’ paintings that worked and my favourite. Sponsored by London South Bank University and Dulux it was only when one of my colleagues, a Biologist, entered the room and innocently said ‘Looks like the feathers of a Secretary Bird to me’ that a huge moment of insight went off in my head. Periodic motion, harmonics…….could they be responsible for the shapes we see in nature? For the calm we experience by the sea? For the beating of the heart that mechanises us?

2009 Bitumen 100x100cm.
Just like the passage of an airplane through the sky is hinted at by the vapour trail it leaves behind, so too, do infinitesimal, fleeting elementary particles leave a ghostly remnant of their existence in a cloud chamber. As so many things in the Quantum world, we cannot see the objects themselves but only what they affect or displace.

2011 Gloss, bitumen, varnish, pigment 100x100cm.
Desire…..chemistry……that certain…………..something……
Whether in literature, philosophy, art, psychology or biology, human desire could be argued to be the fundamental motivation of all human action. Achieving the objects of our desires provides us with a dopamine rush in much the same way as a rare moment of insight….a Eureka moment.
It is something that we crave.

2006 Bitumen on Gesso 190x190cm.

Carbon 12, is the most common form of carbon. Fundamental to all living things and around which organic chemistry is based. Bitumen is one the heaviest of the organic group called Alkanes from which fuels are extracted.

Other carbon forms, such as diamond, graphite and the more recently discovered, nanotubes, fullerenes and graphene not only defy logic in all their complexity, but explain why carbon is simply, beautiful. It forms the chains from which we are built, transformed our history, but is also inherent to our future and paradoxically, could be the reason for our possible demise.