The final stage in my “apprenticeship” years was to finally make a break with the figure to better express the need I had to link music and painting

This began with a series of monoprints driven by a solo piano album from Cecil Taylor, “Garden” made using printing ink and various texturing materials added before and during the printing – the process involved constructing a composition and taking a print, making adjustments (additive or subtractive or actually as a result of the first ink roller pass) followed by another print and so on til the end of the chance driven number of works. This was followed by another series to try to visually reflect the degenerative progression in “1-100” from Michael Nyman in which a note row is repeated 100 times, each featuring a slight reduction or alteration. This was achieved by allowing each successive pass of the roller to re-arrange and partly reduce the contents of the plate. A third series followed reflecting the lyrical and rhythmic qualities as well as the content and context of texts from “Mercier and Camier”, a book by Samuel Beckett. I experimented with different methods of applying the ink using a variety of tools and mixing in materials like pumice, sand, tobacco, pine needles, wax granules etc, to create a range of textures. Print, apply another element, print again, repeat to build a series of related works in the form of a progression, or a series of relative “chords”.

I further experimented with building layers on a prepared ground using varnish with chalk pastels scraped in to make textures like brushed plaster, a layer of (sometimes tinted) varnish, scrape the colours in (like the sand painting techniques of Buddhist monks), allow to dry, repeat etc to build sometimes very interesting images.