Following the exhibition of my 9/11 World Trade Centre paintings, several viewers of the work questioned the dimensions of the plane in relation to the towers in the paintings. Though the paintings were taken directly from photographs and videos of the events it seems a common thing for viewers of the paintings not to realise how small the planes were (comparatively), and consequently how small the human scale is down from that. It’s as if we are so used to seeing television images of all horrors imaginable that we no longer really take in what the images are recording. The ubiquity of instant media imaging, and its rapid turnover, has almost made every image itself disposable as the next disaster takes its visual frame in our daily news.
Working on from replicating the images themselves I have now extended the modification of the finished paintings to the point where they no longer seem derived from the original source. I am now looking at creating contrived constructions of views that were never in the public eye because they were never actually recorded on film.
As well as these most memorable of recent news images I have been taking other press photographs and personally ‘processing’ them. Civilian and military war casualties, victims of social and political policy failures, drug addicts (legal and otherwise), the ever common celebrity excesses and all the other less than positive markers of twenty-first century human civilisation… I want to take the images that we no longer really look at and put them into a medium and location where slow and considered ‘looking’ is not ephemeral or secondary.
“Cashing the put options” 2007
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