Eyes in both Directions - Paul Bishop & Geoff Farquhar-Still

We are very pleased to present two artist for the exhibition “Eyes in both Directions”

Both Geoff and Paul are professional in their approach to their artmaking with Geoff as a sculptor and Paul as a painter. However there is a synergy between the two in what they are we doing which is consistently questioned and why are we doing it. It will be a fabulous exhibition!

Artist statements.

Paul Bishop

I avoid directly explaining my work. I’m not sure that I really understand my paintings anyway - and maintaining some measure of mystery is just too much fun.

 Sure, I’ll talk a bit about process, but not the content.

 Hopefully, the stuff that was on my mind as I painted the work is somehow, obscurely, buried beneath and within the layers of colour and mark that make it up.

Well, that’s what I’d hoped, but lately it seems to me that this might not be the case at all. You see, I’m increasingly unsure about any one-to-one relationship between my state of mind (contentment, grief, boredom or loneliness) and how my pictures proceed or appear.

You try to keep something in your mind but you just can’t seize it. You try to empty that same mind and the same notion remains persistently.

In the lightest of times, for instance, I’ll need to labour over the works. With a head full of misery, a work seems to paint itself.

Go figure!

My role is simply making pictures, and when I can’t act on them any longer, when I regard them as finished, my role has ended. All that remains, once they’re on the gallery wall, is for me to carefully watch and listen. What do viewers make of my efforts, and what’s the difference between this and what I thought I was doing?

Gathering up these responses may very well form part of my next round of painting - or not.

Paul Bishop (May 2025)