Painting is like pushing around the substances of the universe. The material can be directed but often behaves and assumes form according to its own whims and vicissitudes.

Concrete form like memory is constructed out of the flotsam of accumulated experiences, mitigated by the realities of the lived body. These are frequently linked with the often mysterious machinations of the mind's possessing it's inscrutable rationales. Marks and random gesture recall vague narratives from an equally unplumbed past, ethereal yet there nonetheless. One cannot search for the story but only discover it.

The Grey Paintings are a response and homage to these processes; they are places where thought encounters material reality and abstraction meets representation. The paintings spring from a fascination with the act of creation, interactions between material, process and perception and the struggle between serendipity and the will.

The images are often divided between two sometimes three panels. There are multiple rationales for the 'split' figure, actually executed on two panels. Most basic is the desire to avoid a conventional pictorial idiom of the 'picture' as an artificial window and embrace the painting as an object itself. Another is the exploration of the nature of memory, its intrinsic 'fragmented' abstract non-linear qualities - the concept of memory and perception being constructed from seemingly unconnected pieces that we re-assembled. It is indeed an objective exploration of subjective phenomena - the rational with the irrational. It then is a dialogue between the objective and subjective - the material presence of the panels, substance of paint and our tendency (need?) to see in it some tangible image, that is, impose upon it some recognizable form thus meaning.
Mark Gerard McKee 2014