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Carlos - thank-you very much for your comments and your very interesting question (although you flatter me too much comparing me to the two artists you mention).
To answer your question, it seems that all my work these days is moving towards a more inventive and less inhibited stage, where the physical qualities of the paint help define the texture and structure of flesh. For a long time (since those happy, free days at university) I felt there was something very important lacking from my work, although I wasn't sure what. I thought that by refining my painting towards a brilliant realism (which I never achieved) would solve the problem, but it didn't. It just made me more precious and nervous and the paintings reflected this. After looking at one of my latest grandiose disasters in 2004, my very intelligent artist mother suggest I was putting much too much in the painting. This was a breakthrough in ideas for me because I realised that all the work taken to make the flesh look smooth and life-like (which it didn't anyway) I could achieve with just a few strokes. And when I began putting this into practise I started to see that I had much more time and energy to concentrate on other aspects of painting, such as composition, narrative, contrast, colour (things taught (and known) in primary school and stupidly dismissed when I became a "real" artist). So that was a first breakthrough.
The second breakthrough, in the past couple of years came again when I got stuck trying, again, to refine too much: not being willing to shift the figures' boundaries or outlines, or scrape off and rework when things started to feel uncomfortable. So this time, after speaking to a very intelligent university lecturer and told perhaps to add more colour to the shadows and move on to "the next level" (I hadn't a clue what that was in practice, but it did seem like the magic door to the artistic elation I was in need of). I tried and failed a few times and then decided to give it all up in favour of photorealism so I could stand a chance of being a BP Portrait award finalist. And in putting down the first areas of colour for my photorealist work, "Animated self-portrait" started to happen, and I thought the paint was looking much more unexpectedly interesting than a photorealist work might be.
So the intentions were conscious but the actual discovery of satisfying paint marks was accidental and unintentional. I did recently get tired of the choppiness of the marks in "Animated Self-portrait" and rediscovered Velasquez' rounded sculptural marks which I love using and out of that came "Figure in Turban".
And, finally, I am taking very seriously my beginnings of a painting because there is such a pocket of time there where you are uninhibited with your ideas and marks - because of the very likely event of them being covered by the "real" painting (like singing with all your soul and sense of fun in the shower because no-one can really hear you). The beginnings of a work, I feel, are essentially honest and revealing of just where you are as an artist, and so I am trying to leave beginnings showing or keep all marks the beginning ones, just working on composition and narrative i.e. keeping the marks really the means to the resulting painting and not making them the end in themselves.
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