WOLFY SUNSET
Selected Projects
About
Welcome to Sunset Kingdom. A world of longing and a world of the heart. A landscape built of feelings transmuted into marks. Into its waves and skies I have poured my care and attention, my pain and longing. Here I have discovered pleasure and play, and found, time and time again, reasons to return to the ordinary world.
The journey towards Sunset Kingdom has been full of surprising encounters. The subject matter of the paintings reveals itself to me from the unknown. Strange forms and beings emerge, finding coherence through the hand that makes the brushstrokes, a recurring palette of colours and thick marks of delicious paint. Vivid colour counterbalances the bleak greyness of my inner world. Fluorescent pinks and reds break through softer passages of lilac, peach and yellow; turquoise and sea green gather around dark, solitary figures. The colour carries longing as well as pleasure—a reaching towards warmth, intensity and connection.
These paintings are attempts to crystallise a sense of wonder and awe. They are antidotes to bleakness: memories or relics of a journey, as well as dreams of a world beyond the fog. A world of vivid sunsets, magnificent creatures, strange, tender bodies and emotional landscapes. Waves thick as feathers; skies textured like the iridescent scales of a fish.
Moving between figuration and abstraction, the paintings bring together fragmented faces, imagined creatures and handwritten words. Recurring figures become archetypes within a personal mythology. The whale carries a gentle bigness, its life beneath the surface suggesting depths of feeling that remain largely unseen. Faces are exposed and unstable: eyes, mouths and tears become exaggerated marks, hovering between the comic and the sorrowful. These figures carry an element of self-portraiture, exploring the discomfort of being seen alongside the desire to be close to others.
Working in acrylic on canvas, I use brushstrokes to give these worlds movement and texture. Thick, curling strokes sit alongside thin washes and dry marks that catch the weave. Bands of colour stretch across the surface like changing light, interrupted by dark, wandering lines, splashes and ridges of paint. Figures and their surroundings share the same restless brushwork, allowing a face, a sea or a sky to become a place where feeling takes physical form.
I have long played with different ways of introducing people to the saga of this creative world. After all this time, perhaps the simplest way is to tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in a year called 2016, I found myself painting a sunset sky flanked by fjords. In the middle, a figure gazes into the distance from a mass protruding above the ocean. The figure was cut from a magazine: an explorer, perhaps, or someone from an advert. I can no longer quite remember.
Paintings carry conversations with them: scraps of language, a logic, a poetry. It takes time for a work to let go of the bits that don’t stick. Many things change. False titles fall away. This painting has always held onto three pieces of text: “The Discovery”, “The Call to Adventure”, and “Fishing for Minnows on the Back of a Whale”.
Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows is a Polynesian saying I had recently encountered whilst listening to Joseph Campbell’s conversation with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth. Campbell connects it to the “ground of being” - the deep source of existence is also the source of our own being, yet our attention stays turned outward toward little problems and pursuits. Missing the whales and the sunset, chasing god knows what little insignificant small things. Desperately seeking connection to life, while overlooking that we are already an expression of it.
Crossing the Threshold
After this first Sunset painting I began to make more pieces, many of them mixed media collages that felt like dreams or wishes from my insides. In hindsight it is clear that I was being called by my creativity to go exploring. And the works I was making seemed to be telling me where I needed next to go.
Mixed media, 2016 — details
Mixed media, 2016 — details
Transformation and the Unknown
In Iceland I became obsessed with the relationship between the ever changing weather and its influence on the landscape. I found myself often in a position of awe and equipped with nothing but my camera and my field note book I sought to not only document the world as it was unfolding around me, but also to play with reality.
Returning after Iceland I found myself returning time and time again to the same subject matter of the landscape. With devotion and obsession.
Expansion of the Field of Vision
It was amidst the isolation and restrictions of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 that the impulses to create landscapes on a much bigger scale began to hatch.
I had never let myself take up so much space with my paintings and yet, because of my background as a theatre director, working with large scale pictures felt quite natural to me. And yet, like most people, my urge to expand was practically limited by the physical confines of my room. I commenced making a series of multi-panelled paintings that were made up of interconnected parts. They could open up and take up space, and then be put away in a space much smaller than their scope.
The increase in scale allowed me to make bigger gestures with the brush, and the marks, thus creating more movement. In contrast to the captivity of my physical body, these paintings served as a vehicle into expansiveness. The jubilance of making them is evident in the works themselves, which are bursting with energy and depict an ecstatic, blazing world.
The most ambitious and detailed of these multipanelled works is a painting, which stands as tall and wide as I am tall (6 feet), and has sometimes resisted a title, but seems to accept being called “Family Portrait”, as long as its made clear that this family being depicted has little todo with other people and is much more about the family of creatures and characters inside an individual.
There’s a central figure who has this green eye hanging in the frame around their heart area. They seem to be holding the little wolf cub like creature on the left panel in a gesture of care.
The wolf cub has fangs that could be mistaken for being quite scary but something about them seems also to be harmless. The wolf cub seems to only have one eye.
There is another figure on the right who also only has one eye (the one which the wolf cub doesn’t have). This figure has a pair of huge gold horns and seems to be in possession of some kind of ancient or knowing power.
Family Portrait — Panel 7 (2020) · Acrylic on canvas · 61 × 61 cm
Marks of Feeling
Psychological analysis of the figurative iconography of these pieces aside, the expansion of the painting practice into a bigger scale was always about finding more space for more brushstrokes. The size of these works allowed for a lot more detail in the texture and choreography of mark making. It felt a bit like if a dancer had been let out of the small basement they had been practicing where they could barely turn around without knocking over an old sink or rusty deckchair - jumps out of the question, they would hit their head on the ceiling - and given the keys to a big dance studio where they could finally leap!
The Social: Present and Elsewhere, Together and Apart
I started to imagine this place called The Sunset Kingdom diner which is both a great place to have a cup of tea whilst watching the sun rise or fall. To take in the world in solitude without having to worry about what your face is doing.
Or where you might find yourself gathered with others for some kind of celebration. In the painting called The Social Gathering I once again find myself revealing myself to myself in my choice of subject matter and the thing I paint my attention upon.
The figures are either faceless or without a head. They seem to be connecting through physical touch but also there is something that positions the viewer/me as the painter outside the picture. There are a few disembodied hands which reveal an obsession in the question of touch and connection and what we are holding on to. One hand is holding a phone. Another seems to be rising out from under the table, as if to say, there is an underbelly to all of this. Bottom right is a small creature that is labelled as “Lamb of Dog”, and looks a bit like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, who seems to be launching into Macbeth’s soliloquy “Is this a dagger”, directed at the bread knife. On the surface of another phone, face up on the table, is written the text “the isolated conversation”.
The final painting in this selection is one from a collection of drawings and paintings of torsos that I started making in 2023. And is still ongoing.
Here I continued to work with some of the colours and imagery from my earlier works but was seeking a way to introduce more drawings into my paintings.
I am inspired here by the way that queer bodies seek to embrace the invitation to reclaim their bodies as sites for expression, treating it as a canvas and also material to be sculpted with.
Once Sunset Kingdom started to have people in it, it felt only natural that they would be walking works of art, wearing their experiences, their hearts and their dreams on their skin.