This Corrosion

This Corrosion was one of my very first abstract paintings. Inspired by the same cold walk as Winter Trees, where I saw some old metal signs and a corrugated iron shed, long abandoned, I became briefly obsessed with corrosion, or as Tears for Fears put it in their song Break it Down Again, "the beauty of decay".

I quite literally decayed the canvas; painting heavily over it, then distressing the surface with rough paper and reapplying more paint with the same implement. The edges of the canvas are almost ragged with overworking and I retained the matt finish rather than the normal satin varnish I use to finish a painting.

Although this is an old image, it is a favourite with friends, so I think there is something captured here by innocence that I perhaps haven't captured so well since.