making paintings in response
to a setting like blenheim
was really unlike anything i've done before
i have so many feelings
and emotions and thoughts about england as a place
it just seemed a very natural fit to me
i decided to include a vitrine
of my source material in the exhibition
it felt like almost
spewing the inside of my brain out for all to see
and it looked very much like my studio floor
because i work from different source material all the time
including the vitrine really helps people find a way into the paintings probably the
thing that struck me the most in person
was the duke's armorial banner that's in the great hall
i've worked from a little tiny reproduction and just sort of did my own version of that banner
like treated it as almost a ready-made like a sort of
almost like a jasper john's the way he
treats the flag or a target of taking something existing and basically painting it life size
the hunt is just such a great subject
and i almost feel like i've wanted to paint it for years but
this just seemed like the perfect opportunity to to
paint a subject so dramatic
but also that would be relevant to a place like blenheim
i work on lots of paintings side by side at the same time
so i was working on several paintings with the subject of the hunt
and the one dog is life very quickly became
mostly about that dog who's kind of i guess dying
he's probably been gored by the boar
so it's just a very very dramatic and horrific image
that i was drawn to
i knew i wanted to include works on paper
as well as paintings in the exhibition
even though the drawings aren't studies for specific paintings
they take place alongside the paintings
so i felt like again showing the drawings
sort of gives it just gives a deeper experience
and helps you read the paintings
probably my favorite painting at blenheim
one of my favorites was the joshua reynolds portrait of
the duke and his children
so i decided not just make a copy of the reynolds
but actually print it
and almost be able to carry on with it myself
as if i were joshua
i really wanted to focus on the on the girls
you know it's actually quite a disturbing image
but you know the portrait as a whole there's so much going on
that you don't necessarily see at first
would have noticed a recurring image um which is the blenheim spaniel um i noticed the blenheim
spaniel first in the reynolds painting i i really like the way that in the reynolds the blenheim
spaniel in the bottom corner really pins down the action it really you know works as a device
i think in a lot of the more abstract paintings i like the idea of having this dog
almost as a this visual hook so that once you see the dog
it's easier to start seeing echoes of other animal forms and then human forms and so on
i've often painted the landscape like imaginary landscapes usually or memories of landscapes
and the older i've got the more i've realized that all my landscape paintings are really
about a sort of longing
one of the first things that you notice at blenheim is the presence of war
i feel like i've always wanted to make paintings of battles and a bit like the hunts i just never
really didn't really seem like a relevant thing to do till now so i really got into this idea of
the criss-crossing grass sort of behaving the same as the criss-crossing weaponry
and that they could almost be interchangeable
i think in cornets and coronets i'd already been painting quite a few with this kind of
grass idea and the crisscrossing blades of grass which really serves so many purposes i
mean they slice up the picture plane but they also almost give an instant sense of space
but i knew i wanted to do more than just throw a bunch of paintings on the walls and one way
to intervene in a different way was to do a carpet obviously there are so many carpets and tapestries
there already it just seemed a very natural thing to do to be able to get a painting another
way of showing a painting really but to put a painting on the floor rather than on the walls
the painting the triumph of death is a painting that i'd seen in sicily
a couple of years before called the triumph of death it's by an anonymous
15th century artist and it's just this absolutely extraordinary image
you've got scary skeleton basically galloping into town on his skeletal horse causing havoc
so he basically crosses all four panels it's an amazing composition on the bottom left i
basically got all the the destruction in his wake i use the red coat or the red jacket actually
throughout the exhibition it could be either a hunter or a soldier and then there's like some
memorial poppies and even churchill's bowler hat and the right bottom panel there's sort of the
ladies and gentlemen still sipping their champagne while death comes charging into town
there's literally just so much space when you're working on that scale that
you can squeeze like every single thing you've ever wanted to put in a painting into one space
it's such a grand gesture it's so kind of overblown and over the top
that it just seemed to add anything after that would be gilding the lily
you