The Chemistry of Creation.

In 1986 I completed a PhD in Biochemistry.

In 1991, after 5 years in Europe, I started painting full time.

What attracted you to Biochemistry to begin with?

The allure of biochemistry was a fascination with the chemistry of the body. How things, unseen things, happened on a cellular and molecular level. It all seemed much more exciting than regular life. It was a feeling of infinite possibility waiting to be uncovered and there was an associated sense of wonder that accompanied it.

Do you feel that studying Biochemistry has informed how you approach your painting practice?.

In many ways biochemistry and painting are very similar. They are both concerned with the building blocks of life. The former with the life of a biological system and the later with the life of a painting and there’s a wonderful excitement and curiosity associated with them both.

With biochemistry you are trying to uncover knowledge that already exists. With my art practice it is still very much about uncovering rather than constructing. In art one is uncovering a different form of knowledge. It’s not about facts and logic. It’s about creating space or an environment for things to disclose their true nature. An analogy would be the difference between and open and closed flower. In both situations the petals exist but the sense of experience, of space is so different between the two situations. For me the painting experience is all about opening space for wonder to exist.I’m not trying to force a particular experience on the viewer, rather catalyze an opening or unfolding of space inside the viewer for experience to happen. I believe that quality of experience is directly aligned with size and integrity of space. This is why vulnerability can lead to a very different experience to remaining closed because one allows a larger space to open.This notion of space I’m referring to here is like a playing field for experience to play out. It’s not a logic thing.

Is there a difference in one’s delivery between experiments in a laboratory and painting in your studio?

Yes…it’s a very different situation between the two endeavors.

With biochemistry you must think about the experiment you wish to undertake. You need to plan and construct how you are going to inform an outcome. You need to recreate as best you can in vivo conditions in a test tube and consider variables. It’s a very planned and precise exercise and you need to be able to reproduce or duplicate the results. There’s an exactitude needed. At the time this structure and exactitude suited my sensibilities.

In my painting practice things are very different.I never start with an idea or any form of structure. There’s no initiation from inspiration or preliminary thought process involved.I never think ahead to what I’m going to do or back to what I’ve done.

This isn’t just intuitive free expression.

I have a sense, a fealty of the sense of space and light I want to find but the process is very much about being and acting with authority in the moment’s presence. In all my work, space directly relates to the quality of light in the work. It’s a split-second thing that in the moment of execution I know exactly what I am doing and am totally committed to it. At this point it’s very much like biochemistry in that you are totally focused…and yet with art I remain somewhat detached at the same time, almost like an observer rather than participant. I try and totally surrender to that moment, but I have no idea what I’m going to do in the next moment…until I’m in it.

When one thinks about split-second moments there’s this sense of urgency and confined structural parameters and for many years this is the environment I operated in…one of urgency and a pressure of having to not drown in it.But in actual fact within that notion of the split-second there’s this sense of overwhelming expanse…like an infinite dimension. It’s when I’m in this state that I feel I am being absolutely honest in my work.

So how do you know when a work is finished and how is that different from an experiment in the laboratory?

With an experiment in the laboratory, you follow a set of instructions you have thought of in the design of the experiment and the experiment is finished when those instructions are completed. Then you analyze the results, see what it shows and perhaps modify the experiment to find or achieve something else. The idea of an experiment having its own life is complex because you are changing variables and seeing how that effects results. This is generally carried out in a staged in vitro situation. The success of this relies to a large degree on the integrity of all elements involved and the design of the experiment. There’s logic involved.

For many artists the process is very similar where the work is planned out.

Of course, in both situations the focus is on…” Has it worked”. In science this is a factual matter and then one pieces the facts to create a possible scenario.

The notion of a painting working is crucial, but of course this is biased towards what the artist is wanting from it.

I used to continually pause the process, step back and analyze if the work was what I wanted.After many years I realized this was an aesthetic judgement and that within this approach I was destroying much of the work’s spirit and life for a sense of being in control…of it being MY painting.

Now I don’t stop and stand back. I don’t even look at the work as a whole anymore as a way to formulate composition.

Within that split-second moment of commitment to the mark, there’s no self-critique or judgement. I become very aware of myself rather than the painting. This doesn’t happen in science as one’s focus is always on the experiment, on the data. Completion of a painting arises when I realise I have nothing more to add that is honest, that is not an added thought. This is when the work truly is a surprise and exciting and there’s a huge amount of energy to this moment.

Then you must leave it be. It’s so easy to engage the logical brain and make adjustments and instantly and irretrievably lose the life of the work for a premeditated sense of aesthetic.

This isn’t a recipe.

It’s not straight forward in any sense at all and with this approach all sorts of areas of oneself are opening, closing, re-evaluating and clarifying just like activity at a cellular level.

It all seems about finding some sense of stillness within the vastness of infinite possibility.

This was not something I could attain as a biochemist. There was this continual need to know …to attain and consume knowledge that you could store as your own. It could be overwhelming.

Neither biochemistry or art are easy pursuits on any level. They demand total commitment and a degree of obsession to uncover a sense of the truth.

Is there a common spark that has been maintained between science and art for you?

In both pursuits there’s a sense of something much bigger going on. There’s this mystery side to both science and art which is so compelling on so many levels.

Also, there’s the notion of the reaction or reaction sequence…of two or more substrates reacting to form a totally different and unique product that exhibits completely different properties to its component parts. It’s like going from one realm into another… one space of awareness to another.

In both science and art there’s this alchemy to witness that one has no control over. On one level its precise and logical and on the other its so mysterious. There’s this wonderful duality happening.

In a few words how would you summarise the main difference between biochemistry and painting?

The truth in science is based to a large degree on data and the replication of that data, whereas in art the notion of a truth is very much a felt experience.