THE MARK OF MAKING

There comes a point in making when certain decisions no longer feel like decisions.

They become instinct.

This painting of the Aston Martin AMB 001 followed my work on the Valkyrie and, looking back, I can see something important had changed. The process had begun to move from conscious experimentation into muscle memory.

I knew when to make a mark and when to leave one alone. I knew how far the image could dissolve before it needed to return. Precision and abstraction were no longer opposing ideas that had to be carefully balanced; they had begun to work together naturally.

The motorcycle appears through layers of lines, fragments and movement. Some passages are carefully observed, particularly around the mechanical structures, while others are allowed to stretch, disappear or remain unresolved. The eye completes what the hand has deliberately left unfinished.

There is an idea from Japanese sword making that I often think about: the hamon — the visible temper line that emerges along the blade as a consequence of the making process.

It is not decoration applied afterwards. It is evidence of how the object came into being.

I recognise something similar in the marks within this painting.

The horizontal gestures, exposed construction lines, interruptions and areas of disappearance were no longer techniques I was consciously trying to develop. They had become traces of the way I worked — a visual language formed through repetition, experimentation and time.

Perhaps that is what finding your own way of making eventually becomes.

Not a style imposed upon the work, but something that appears naturally because your hand has travelled the same path often enough to remember it.

The mark becomes part of the maker.