Text by Stephen West

 

These works were made over the last two years or more. I draw whenever the other pressures of life give me a space.

 

What you are seeing are my internal thoughts and concerns mediated through the sights and sensations of contemporary rural existence.

 

Drawing for me is a basic sort of communication and allows me to express ideas through texture, line, tone and image – things which don’t really have a verbal form.

 

Every artwork is made somewhere and always retains that stamp of its origin. The architecture of my buildings and the shape of my landscape is always present in my work. My studio is an old cow barn in Mid Wales and has been so for 37 years.

 

How I start a drawing varies a lot. It might be from scraps of drawings on the studio floor, or by connecting two drawings together, or it might be something I see that I want to make a drawing about. I have sketchbooks or symbols that I often use to put into drawings that take it somewhere new. I like to vary the medium, so although charcoal is a staple for its transient quality, I like to use paint or ink or collage on occasions.

 

I have many influences. Great drawings by Van Gogh, Piranesi and Tiepolo; classical Japanese and Chinese painting and drawing; Basquiat and Dubuffet; Picasso, of course.. but more as a graphic artist than a painter; Matisse for his charcoal work; later German Expressionists like A. R. Penck; COBRA artists like Pierre Alechinsky; Willem de Kooning... I could go on. These are all mark-makers, not conceptualists.