Bois de Bologna (Large Version)

When I was travelling in France to try to extend my knowledge of the so-called ‘greats’ of the visual arts I discovered this huge park in Paris near the Rodin Museum.

Returning some years later I made a drawing in the park across several hours, which I called “Time Lapse Experiment”.

As various scenes passed before me – donkey rides, picnics, people passing, shopping trollies… I overlayed them onto the image beneath, then, at regular intervals erased random sections.

I swapped the original work for a night on a couch some-where, but, having taken a colour copy, worked the image up into this very large piece and a related medium sized piece.

That process of addition and subtraction has become an important technique that runs through the various streams of work and helps to liberate the approach from preciousness.

It also creates a kind of ‘staccato’ feeling and helps as a method of simplifying complex images.

Here we can see the trunks of the trees and the various things that happened whilst I was sitting there.

There’s a portrait in there too, achieved by laying the subject onto the canvas itself to instruct the obscuring process.