Conversations with Jessie- New Paintings by Derek McGuire

About

My pictures are primarily a relationship between my found sources within a setting. I have an extensive visual archive and ideas collected from newspapers, the internet and literature and from my own photographs and videos. Sketches from source contain observations of movements, moods of nature and extremes of weather. Importantly, I don't paint what I see but what I have seen, heard, read, felt or experienced. Painting allows me to show combinations that may not exist in the world, to create imagery out of thin air, to imagine possibilities and suggestions. I play with the paint to find meaning, trying to fathom out the connections between my image, surface and technique. Each work is a performance which may or may not come off. It's a method of chance, risk and edginess. Darker and lighter sides of personal experiences, memories and hopes are exposed. Mood changes and imaginations in the paintings always stem from a foundation of fact and experience. There can be a sense of melancholy and sometimes menace or danger. I hope to question the audience with my view of life, complete with its nervousness, anxieties and sorrows. My work is increasingly touching upon the conceptual world of childhood. Fundamentally, my Conversations with Jessie, my 2 year old daughter, have opened up a rich vein of connections with my own earliest childhood roots. Derek McGuire March 2009