Grease works

In 1991 I made a work named Liquid Engineering creating a back-lit image of burning oil fields but which might also just be a warming fire if the work was placed in a domestic setting. The image is created using clean and burnt engine oil, engine grease and Henna shampoo in glass scientific test tubes . The work was made around the time of  the Gulf War when images of burning oil fields were seen regularly on TV using industrially made products produced from the same type of crude oil as that in the burning oil fields.

​

Later, in the early 2000’s I made further works using engine grease. I happily acknowledge the influence of Terry Atkinson’s Greaser series of works which use engine grease on panels and in troughs such as MUTE-GREASER 1987. Atkinson wrote about these works of his:- “Grease generates quite a lot of decorative and extraneous incident. It seems to be physically situated across the border of two and three dimensions. An incident in Jo extremis (especially in heat) would be the grease literally falling out of the painting into the world of the gallery, museum, studio etc.”*

 

My Grease works were directly related to landscape and landscape painting some made purely using engine grease on panel or Lightbox whilst others were depicted a landscape or semi abstract landscape set between the figurative and the abstract. Indirectly some referred to the work of Samuel Palmer, a key figure in the British Romantic movement of the19th Century- particularly his black and white pen and ink drawings of landscapes at night such as Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep 1833 and also A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star 1830. I made Tar Grease 2009, Tar Grease (slide) 2009 and Grease Flood Sluice (electric moon) 2008 thinking of these works by Palmer as well as Black Sun (electric) 2009 and Grease Sun (new world) 2009

 

I was also thinking of the writing of artist Gustav Metzger and specifically his text ‘nature demised resurrects as environment’. This essay discusses the fact that there is a difference between Nature and the Environment. Metzger saw the `environment  as  ‘man’ made as opposed to Nature which is pure. He writes: “ One way forward would be to drop the term Environment, and speak of Nature and damaged Nature.” [Metzger]

The grease in my works is representative of the man-made,  the Environmental.  Nature cannot appear in the work other than actually (a leaf for example) so the depiction of a landscape, the figurative element in my grease works, isn’t Nature but a mixture of a Romantic view of Nature, an image of an idyllic place as well as of the semi-controlled Nature. (although this is impossible despite what we generally believe seem to act on). 

​

With these grease works I was preoccupied with a feeling of a loss of this idea of pure Nature.  I felt I had experienced it as a child, being in pure Nature in my youth when I would spend much time fishing beside rivers and ponds,  playing at building camps in woods, making camp fires, exploring and climbing trees. I was blissfully unaware of the complications of the modern industrial environment where pure Nature had actually been subsumed and blended completely into the man made environment or damaged a Nature. 

 

Some of these grease works are both on the macro and micro level- like enlarged microscope slides. I wanted reference to science and industry as well as an implied close examination. Some grease works appear as if scaled up and perhaps a small section of a Samuel Palmer ink drawing of a moon depicted in a sky of dark engine grease. Other works do actually contain Nature itself in the form of leaves but mixed with engine grease and held between acrylic sheets a bit like samples on a microscope slide.

Some of my grease works were based specifically on rural settings I'd experienced in the English Midlands where I had my studio in an ex-cow shed In Atherstone on Stour at the time.  There are grease water falls as in Grease Fall 2007 a work on a gesso panel. The same ‘image'  is also presented in Grease Flood Sluice (electric moon) 2008. This is a landscape oil painting on a thick wooden board panel with carved out 'troughs' of grease representing water and with a backlit 'moon' reflection in the grease ‘river’. Piped 2012 has a plastic house gutter full of engine grease running along the bottom edge of a thick wooden panel on which is painted a semi landscape image covered in grease under acrylic sheet. This work is also penetrated by a drain pipe appearing to run through the panel and emerging each side and in the middle of painted surface. A landscape treated like a drain. In Oilscape 2007-8, a semi abstract seascape there is a clear tube running through the gesso panel which is filled with engine oil contained by rubber stoppers at each end. The bottom half of the surface of the panel is black and appears sticky like Tarmacadam above which is a 'sky' of green scratchy clouds. Sunset Blade (Grease Green) 2007-10 has a circular saw blade sun and Grease Sun (new world) 2009 has an orange grease sun above a grease landscape which is influenced by Paul Nash's We are Making a New World .

In 2013 I made connected works- a series called Everything and the Kitchen sink which are in a separate section on this website. They were self standing light boxes using half a stainless steel kitchen sink on one side and a surface of back-lit opal acrylic with plants, glue, engine grease and paint squashed between this and a sheet of clear acrylic on top.

 

MH 2024