PROCESS REFLECTION

BY ANTHONY CAREY

Revised August 2026

My paintings begin through making rather than with a fixed image. I often start by allowing diluted acrylic to move across the canvas, turning and tilting it until a figure, landscape or less identifiable form begins to suggest itself. I respond to what appears by adding plaster, drawing and further layers of paint. The surface is then scraped back, covered and reconsidered. Forms emerge, disappear and sometimes return in altered ways.

I don't think of this as uncovering an image that was already there. The painting develops through an exchange between intention, accident and material resistance. Each decision changes what becomes possible next. A mark may suggest a figure, but attempting to define it too completely can diminish its presence. I am often more interested in the point at which something is becoming visible than in bringing it to a polished resolution.

Plaster has a particular role in this process. It dries quickly, cracks under pressure and cannot be controlled in the same way as paint. Scraped too early, it pulls away; left too long, it hardens and resists. I also use embedded materials, adhesives and fragments of dried paint. These create physical interruptions in the surface and retain evidence of earlier decisions. What has been covered is not always completely concealed, and what has been removed may leave a scar, edge or residue behind.

The figures that emerge are rarely complete. They may appear fractured, partially buried or out of alignment with their surroundings. I avoid correcting them into idealised bodies because their instability feels important. Their incompleteness reflects my own experience of physical change and a shifting sense of identity, but they are not literal self-portraits. They remain open enough to carry associations beyond my own life.

Memory, loss and belonging enter the paintings indirectly. I don't begin by deciding to illustrate a particular event or emotion. Instead, these concerns become present through the way forms appear and disappear, through distance, interruption and the accumulation of material. I have become increasingly interested in what remains after people, relationships and places change, and in how absence can continue to be experienced as a form of presence.

That's why the history held within the surface matters to me. Earlier forms may remain faintly visible beneath later layers, while scraped areas expose something that had seemed lost. The surface becomes a record of additions, concealments and returns. It resembles memory in that respect: incomplete, changeable and capable of bringing something from the past into the present without restoring it exactly as it was.

My understanding of this process has developed alongside looking at artists whose work allows uncertainty to remain visible. I am drawn to the spectral figures of Nathan Oliveira and to the physical directness of Manuel Neri, whose forms appear to emerge from rough and worked material. In Jack B. Yeats’s later paintings, figures and places seem inseparable from the movement of the paint itself. Albert Oehlen’s willingness to disrupt an image rather than protect its coherence has also been important to me. Leonora Carrington’s engagement with myth, transformation and unstable identities offers a different but related way of allowing figures to exist between recognisable states.

I don't regard these artists as stylistic models. They have helped me recognise why I resist resolving a painting too neatly and why a form that remains partial can sometimes possess greater psychological weight.

My reading of Jung developed in a similar way. I became interested in archetypes after recurring figures and situations had already appeared in the work: solitary travellers, watchers, shadows, crossings and thresholds. I do not consciously set out to paint the Wanderer, the Shadow or the Threshold Guardian. These ideas offer a way of reflecting on forms that emerge intuitively, but they do not determine what a painting means. Mythology and Jungian thought provide frameworks through which I can consider the work while leaving it open to other interpretations.

That openness is essential. I may recognise the source of a painting in my own experience, but I don't want that experience to close the work around a single explanation. A viewer may encounter something entirely different in the same figure, colour or space. The painting exists between what I have carried into its making and what another person brings to it.

I often leave works unresolved in the studio for long periods. They remain where I can see them under changing light until some part of the surface begins to demand attention. Occasionally the next decision is to add something; just as often, it is to remove, obscure or interrupt what has become too certain. The work is finished not when everything has been explained, but when its different states can remain present without one cancelling out the others.

For me, painting is a way of giving physical form to that condition. The surface holds what has been added, buried, altered and rediscovered. It does not restore what has gone or resolve every division. It allows different traces to coexist and asks what can remain present even after its original form has changed.