Mediums and messages

I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between the stories we tell and the way we understand the world, particularly how stories have helped us establish ideas about right and wrong, responsibility, justice and what we owe one another. These ideas run through much of my recent work, although they haven't always been entirely conscious. Often I'll begin a painting with a fairly loose set of thoughts and find that the more interesting questions emerge while I'm working.

Much of this has led me back to folklore, mythology and fairy tales. I'm interested in them partly because of their extraordinary longevity, but more importantly because of the purpose they once served. Before our modern systems of education and mass communication, stories were one of the principal ways that knowledge, experience and moral understanding passed between generations. They provided a way of thinking about things that were difficult to explain directly. Cruelty, greed, betrayal, loyalty and responsibility could all be explored through characters and situations that people remembered and passed on.

I think there's a connection here to the idea of the social contract. A great deal of our understanding of acceptable behaviour comes from ideas we've absorbed through other people. Stories have always played a part in establishing that common understanding, communicating the principles that make cooperation possible and gradually shaping what a society expects from its members.

Writers such as Marina Warner and Jack Zipes have explored the cultural and political significance of fairy tales, particularly how they carry the values, fears and contradictions of the societies that produce them. Those values haven't always been admirable. Stories have also reinforced prejudice, justified authority and preserved inequalities. But this is partly what makes them interesting. They reveal how moral ideas become established, shared, challenged and eventually changed.

For most of human history, storytelling involved direct human contact. Somebody told a story, somebody else listened, and its meaning was shaped partly by the relationship between them. Today, much of our understanding of the world comes through digital media, selected and reorganised by algorithms. We encounter thousands of fragments of information without necessarily knowing who is communicating them or why. Much of this material still originates with other people, but artificial intelligence is also beginning to produce cultural material without the direct involvement of anyone who has lived through the experiences being described.

I wonder what effect this might have on the way we develop empathy and a shared moral understanding. Human beings learn partly through the experiences of others, and stories allow us to imagine situations beyond our own lives. From a psychological perspective, this strikes me as one of their most important functions. A fictional account of cruelty or injustice can produce a genuine emotional response, allowing us to consider another person's circumstances without experiencing them ourselves.

Theories of predictive processing in neuroscience suggest that perception is shaped by expectations developed through previous experience. We don't encounter the world as completely objective observers. Our memories, beliefs and assumptions influence what we see and how we respond to it.

I find this particularly relevant to figurative painting. A painted figure invites us to make sense of another person, often with very little information. Their posture, expression and surroundings suggest a situation, but rarely explain it completely. The viewer has to contribute something of their own.

In Moral Witness, I was thinking about the relationship between seeing something and accepting responsibility for what has been seen. The painting presents a vulnerable, withdrawn figure within a landscape that appears disrupted or fragmented. Her face is largely concealed, and a bird passes overhead. I wanted the image to feel recognisable but somehow unsettled, as though something about the world it depicts has become uncertain.

Susan Sontag explored similar questions in Regarding the Pain of Others, examining the complicated relationship between images of suffering and the responses they provoke. Seeing another person's pain doesn't automatically produce understanding, and sympathy doesn't necessarily lead to action. We now encounter images of violence and injustice alongside entertainment, advertising and the ordinary details of other people's lives. Something that might once have occupied our attention for days can disappear from view within minutes.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas approached responsibility through the ethical significance of encountering another person. His concept of the face concerned the recognition of another human being whose existence and vulnerability cannot be entirely reduced to our assumptions about them. I find something in that idea that resonates with portraiture. A face can suggest an entire life beyond the surface of a painting, while the concealment of a face can make us conscious of what we don't know.

I like the uncertainty that painting allows. Unlike the constant movement of digital imagery, a painting remains still. We can reconsider our first impressions, notice something we missed and perhaps become aware of our own prejudices.

There is a long history of artists using figurative painting to examine morality. Hogarth built narratives around recognisable social behaviour and its consequences, while Goya explored the irrationality, violence and cruelty that exist beneath supposedly civilised society. I'm not attempting the same kind of direct social commentary, but I feel a connection to that tradition of using familiar imagery to examine uncomfortable aspects of human nature.

The Juniper Tree approaches these questions through folklore more directly. The painting takes its starting point from one of the most disturbing tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. A boy is murdered by his stepmother, his body is fed to his unsuspecting father, and he eventually returns as a bird, singing of the murder before exacting revenge and being restored to human form.

It's a grotesque story, but beneath the violence are familiar human motivations: jealousy, resentment, guilt, betrayal and the desire for justice. The most fundamental relationships of trust within a family have been destroyed, and ordinary human behaviour seems incapable of putting things right. Justice eventually arrives, but through further violence. The story doesn't offer a particularly comfortable understanding of morality.

In the painting, I wanted to draw upon these ideas rather than produce a straightforward illustration. The figure and bird occupy a landscape that references traditional painting, while contemporary geometric elements interrupt the composition. I like the tension between these different visual languages. It allows an old story to exist in the present without pretending that the world in which it originated is the same as our own.

Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder used folklore, religious narratives and allegory to explore human foolishness and moral contradiction. Their paintings could be absurd, grotesque, amusing and unsettling, sometimes simultaneously. I've always found that approach appealing. I don't particularly want my paintings to tell people what to think. I'd rather create something that encourages them to question what they're looking at.

My working methods are largely traditional. I paint in oils, often building images through an imprimatura, grisaille and successive glazes. These processes have been used for centuries, and I'm drawn to the gradual way an image develops through them. The relationship between old techniques and contemporary subject matter is important to me, as is the time involved. Painting demands prolonged attention, both in its making and, ideally, in its viewing.

Self Portrait as the Mad King deals with somewhat different concerns, although I see it as part of the same enquiry into identity, morality and our understanding of other people.

The painting is a self-portrait, or perhaps more accurately a portrait of an artist, in which I've cast myself as George III, the British monarch remembered by many as the Mad King. His identity has become inseparable from the way his illness and behaviour were interpreted and subsequently mythologised. The historical individual was considerably more complicated than the caricature that has survived him.

The straitjacket and paper crown carry fairly obvious associations. There's something faintly ridiculous about presenting myself in this way, but also a more serious question about the identities we assign to people. Artists have a long association with eccentricity, obsession and behaviour that might be considered irrational outside a creative context. I'm interested in where the distinction between imagination and instability is drawn, and who gets to make that judgement.

Self-portraiture is a peculiar exercise because you're simultaneously the person being examined and the person controlling how that examination takes place. Rembrandt, Goya and Francis Bacon all used their own image to explore much more than physical likeness. I think self-portraiture inevitably involves an element of performance, even when the intention is to produce something completely honest.

There's also a slight political nod in the painting. The paper crown suggests the absurdity of authority and the sometimes fragile distinction between the person holding power and the symbols that legitimise it. But I wouldn't want the work reduced to a commentary on any particular politician. Its more immediate subject is the artist himself.

The way people are represented, remembered and sometimes reduced to a particular version of themselves also connects to my ongoing series of imagined death masks.

The project began with concerns about literature and artificial intelligence, particularly the possibility that the work of significant writers might eventually become detached from the people and experiences that produced it.

The paintings depict imagined plaster death masks of writers, painted in oils on 37cm square panels. The faces are generally grey, while the backgrounds are flat colours I've chosen intuitively after spending time reading the authors' work.

There is a deliberate contradiction in the process. Each painting begins with a rough AI-generated image, usually a fairly disturbing approximation of a death mask. I use this alongside photographs of the writer to develop the painting through traditional methods. I'm interested in the irony of using the very technology that prompted my concerns about literature to explore those concerns. There's something appealing about taking an image produced without any understanding of the person it represents and gradually turning it into something that has been considered and worked on by a human being.

Historically, death masks occupied a position somewhere between portraiture, memorial and physical relic. A plaster cast preserved a direct physical impression of someone who had lived and eventually died. My paintings are imagined objects rather than records of actual masks. Some of the writers I've considered are still alive, which introduces the slightly unsettling idea of anticipating an absence that hasn't yet occurred.

The writers interest me because their work emerged from particular lives and experiences. Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou and Charles Dickens inhabited very different worlds, but their writing was shaped by their relationships, observations, struggles and emotional lives. Their work might involve fiction and imagination, but the understanding behind it came from being human.

An artificial intelligence system can analyse language, recognise patterns and produce convincing prose. It may even create something that genuinely moves a reader. But it hasn't experienced the things it's describing. It has never been bereaved, frightened of death, betrayed by someone it loves or overwhelmed by the physical sensation of being alive.

I find it difficult to accept that those experiences are incidental to the creation of meaningful literature. They seem fundamental to it.

Walter Benjamin explored the relationship between storytelling and experience in his 1936 essay The Storyteller. He was concerned with the gradual displacement of traditional storytelling by modern information, and described how a storyteller leaves traces of themselves within a story, much as a potter leaves impressions in clay. I find that a compelling idea. The words are important, but so is the person who arranged them, the life they led and the understanding of the world that made those words possible.

My concern isn't simply whether AI can produce a convincing imitation of an author's work. It's whether the human experiences behind that work will retain their importance as literary production becomes increasingly automated. There's something rather sad about imagining a writer's life's work being absorbed into a system, reduced to patterns and data, and reproduced without any meaningful connection to the individual who created it.

The death masks are an attempt to bring that person back into consideration.

They also belong to the tradition of memento mori, although I'm not particularly interested in presenting death as a warning. What interests me just as much is survival. Writers who died generations ago can still influence people through the experiences they translated into literature. Their physical presence has disappeared, but something of their understanding of the world remains accessible to others.

This brings me back to the wider question of storytelling and morality.

Émile Durkheim understood moral beliefs as inseparable from the collective life of a community, while Alasdair MacIntyre argued for the importance of traditions and social practices in shaping ethical understanding. Both offer useful ways of thinking about how we inherit our ideas of right and wrong.

The social contract is usually discussed through political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, who explored the relationship between individual freedom, collective responsibility and political authority. But I'm interested in something less formal: the everyday expectations of fairness, honesty and consideration that allow people to live alongside one another.

Most of us develop an understanding of these obligations long before encountering them as philosophical ideas. Stories are one of the ways we learn them. A child hearing a fable about greed or a fairy tale about betrayal is being introduced to situations through which human behaviour and its consequences can be imagined and discussed.

Repeated across generations, these narratives contribute to a shared moral vocabulary. They help establish not only what people believe, but what they expect from one another. Those expectations can be wrong, of course, and stories can challenge inherited values as easily as reinforce them. That process of questioning and renegotiation is itself part of their importance.

What concerns me is whether changes in how stories are created, distributed and experienced might also change the way that shared understanding develops.

We often assume that because information can be preserved indefinitely, the knowledge it contains will survive alongside it. But preserving a story and preserving its meaning are two different things. A literary masterpiece can remain available while the circumstances that made it meaningful gradually disappear from collective understanding.

I'm not suggesting that older ways of communicating were necessarily better. Stories have always been rewritten, forgotten and rediscovered, and new technologies can create valuable forms of cultural exchange. But the speed and scale of contemporary communication are extraordinary, and I'm not convinced we yet understand all the consequences.

Across The Juniper Tree, Moral Witness, Self Portrait as the Mad King and the death mask series, I find myself returning to the same underlying questions. How do we learn to distinguish right from wrong? What responsibilities do we have towards one another? How much of our understanding comes from personal experience, and how much is inherited through the experiences of people who came before us?

I don't expect paintings to answer these questions, nor do I believe artists have any particular authority when it comes to explaining how society should behave. What painting can do, I think, is create a space in which these things can be considered without demanding an immediate conclusion.

Perhaps that's why I continue to return to old stories and traditional forms of painting. They provide a connection to the accumulated experiences of people who lived before us. Their fears, mistakes, observations and occasional wisdom have helped shape the moral understanding we inherit, even when we're unaware of it.

The question that interests me is not simply whether those stories will survive.

It's whether the moral understanding they helped create will survive with them.

October 2026