Chaiya Art Awards 2023
I am delighted to be a finalist for the Chaiya Art Awards 2023.
Having barely survived a life changing Stroke at just 34 I determined to live my life ; the eternal truth that we all have two lives, but that the second one begins when we realise we only have one, has defined my life and work since then. Lethe a work which explores all of the people who made us whom we are will be showing on the Southbank in London over Easter from April 7th - 16th.
The Story Behind Lethe
The theme selected by the Chaiya Art Prize for 2023 of Awe and Wonder could have been tailor-made for my work. Awe at what Betjemen called the ‘terror of the infinite’ and wonder at that which placed us, if only for our brief moment, into the here and now.
Lethe for me was a seminal picture , a work about all of the people we loved, and can only exist in memory, yet live on in how we make our life choices.
Lethe came from a place of memory, it's a painting of place and about how those places can define both our past and future. In Lethe I explored how a family tragedy echoed down the generations; a suicide, born in the grinding poverty of the East Lancashire slums marked the lives of the grandparents who raised me.
I could sense their fear, a fear of poverty, and a fear of being seen to succumb to the desperation which swilled around the terraced streets, dark canals and echoing weaving sheds. Even as a child I learned that places make people, and as a young man I believed that to move away was enough. But the imprints places leave on us are inexorable; we are the sum of everything and everyone who made us; places persist in us, but I believe they can be exorcised.