There is no single visual language for a generation, but certain objects seem to have an extraordinary ability to stop people of roughly the same age in their tracks.
Non of these things were important at the time. That may be exactly why they feel so powerful now.
I have become increasingly interested in the objects that sit at the edges of memory. Not the obvious milestone, but the ordinary things we barely registered when they were part of everyday life.
Seen again decades later, those objects can carry an unexpected charge.
The things I paint were once familiar and ordinary. Time has made them distant, but their familiarity remains and seeing them again can suddenly take us back.
That is different from nostalgia.
Nostalgia can suggest the desire to recreate the past. What interests me is the moment of recognition that brings the past flooding back, when the distance between then and now feels very small.
That jolt is what I keep returning to in these paintings.
For someone in their 50s or 60s who grew up in Britain, in the 1970s or 1980s recognition itself can carry real weight.
A piece of art can hold that familiar moment within it, whether it’s chosen as a thoughful gift for someone over 50, or simply because something within it belongs to your own history.
Over the past two years, that same theme of recognistion has found its way into three paintings selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
They are part of an ongoing body of work about the ordinary things that remain within us, and the strange immediacy of meeting them again.
