This is getting ready for the show at Tate Britain, paintings from right now going back to 1989. This is – I wouldn’t say it’s early work, because my early work is really from earlier days. [laughs] The early Eighties. This is late Eighties, so this is kind of, say, seven years after I left St Martin’s which was my BA. I tried to get the groupings right. I mean, I wanted to bring paintings together that I haven’t seen together for a long time, like these three paintings. These three paintings were made in my father’s shed in Canada, in 1994 I think it was, for the first gallery show I did in New York. So we kind of tried to want to make a dark room. At the moment it’s not looking too dark, but these are paintings I made in the early Nineties as well. Yes, so the idea was to have a dark room, and then the dark room would go into this lighter room, which is all these kind of snow paintings, which is here. [Walking] Interestingly, some of these paintings were made at the same time as these dark paintings, and I had originally intended that they be exhibited together, but that never happened, really. We kind of separated them off. So as I say, it’s a good chance to sort of bring works that may have never been together, together. I think maybe that’s an exciting thing for all artists, all painters, is when they have that opportunity, really. [Pause] I just brought in some source material to show you. It’s a few days before the exhibition and it might be interesting to see how some of these paintings evolve. Often etchings are kind of the way that I can move from a photograph to a painting. An etching often pre-dates the painting. Some photographs are just – actually that one kind of does relate to that one, that’s a dead pelican on a beach. And that’s the horse that is in the painting, the Grand Riviere painting. It’s an old horse, and they always seem to be surrounded by vultures getting ready for it to drop. This was… anyone who has ever been to Toronto, or lived in Toronto, would know this tunnel. You see it off the edge of the highway as you’re coming to the city… but then it gets graffiti’d and repainted, and the rainbow changes, meaning depending on who’s painting it This is kind of experimenting with this image for that Echo Lake painting which is in the exhibition as well. Just playing around the idea of echo and sound and – well, it’s a policeman standing on the shore of a lake. There’s a police car behind him, and he’s shouting out to the lake – there’s someone drowning on the lake, or he thinks someone’s drowning on the lake, so he’s shouting out, so it’s… The thing that interests me about the image is, you the viewer are actually in the middle of a lake and you are hearing this sound coming across water. It’s rare that a painting doesn’t start without sourced material or a photograph. But I never really think of it as an archive. [laughs] It’s just stuff. [Pause] The exhibition is all hung now. It’s the day before the opening. There’s probably almost half the works [that] even people who have seen a lot of my work in the UK won’t have seen. So that’s quite, I think, good for the public here. This painting, which is called Man Dressed as Bat, is my most recent – well, one of my most recent paintings. Just finished it a few weeks ago, actually. Started it last year and worked on it very slowly. A lot of the actual marks on it came from natural causes. Rain coming into my studio! Some of those marks were there before I started, and then I kind of allowed the painting to get wet during the making as well. And then I tried to use the paint in a very fluid way, not allow the paint to build up too much. I wanted it to be an ephemeral thing, and I don’t know – a painting you could almost look through. But it’s the most recent painting, and I don’t really know where it will take me. It’s quite emotional really. I mean, I think being amongst all this work, it makes me think about where I made the paintings – you know, the different places. Some of them were made in quite strange studios. Not so much the actual making of them, but as I say, where they were made. And that, to me, is – no, it doesn’t make me feel nostalgic, but it just – it’s a kind of journey in a way.
