Awake at night 

AWAKE AT NIGHT

By reversing the routine of a day, one can start to see anything from a new angle. Under changed conditions we get to know ourselves in some new way. The simple idea of remaining awake at night, or sleeping all day, is used as a metaphor for anomalies that remain harder to pin point. Into the individuals struggle for a good nights sleep, one can read the whole drama of discomfort, disturbance or crisis on a human level.

I don´t sleep well, it´s quite natural, and dreaming is exhausting in fact. The screen play of an overactive director who tries to get the most out of my unconscious, continually re-shooting scenes. It leaves me in need of sleep in the day time and I catch up some of the lost minutes on the frugal studio floor. It refreshes and focuses.

Being awake at night has become a theme, my mind trying to make some sense out of fragmented sequences which seemed so real, but which became absurd or senseless on waking . Paintings are like that too, and in our reading or interpretation of them we reverse the process. As a painter, I try to rebuild the pieces into a coherent image. I partially retain literal untruth to get beyond the simple appearance of things; as an expression of the felt or perceived.

Being awake at night has become part of my process and all the paintings in this group, and many others, with figures or without, aim to present the material that is filtered through this cerebral process. Preoccupations lying somewhere in the background, the sense of an unnamed reality which has an underlying similarity to the recognisable, adding to our experience, but remaining nameless. The paintings own character or drama, deriving from both the implied physical unrest, and some action taking place beyond the confines of the illusory space, implications of some natural disaster for example, or some other inevitable consequence.

Simon Edmondson, October 2008