A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. “My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.” Paul Gauguin

We should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On entering the artist Alan McGowan's studio, everything one might expect from an 'Artist's Studio' stands in place. It is messy. It is cold. There are lines of artist monographs. Paintings lie on the floor, or are pinned to the walls; every surface is covered. And so one enters into a place which seems to operate as an index of the history of painting itself: the 'easel painting', The Studio, with a capital S, the 'Fine Art' tradition. The weight of history seems heavy. We need a 'go-between' to negotiate a place for us, between tradition and our pulses.

Our guide, however, is here: the sheer presence, the protean mass, of The Figure. For it is essentially the human body, the isolated single figure - a projection of ourselves - which sits center stage in McGowan's work.

The body, more particularly, the nude, has held a traditional, respected, legitimate and legitimizing status throughout the centuries. From Greek Classicism to Lucien Freud, the nude occupies a central theme in 'Art'. It is at once loaded and contentious. Yet these intuitive inscriptions of the human body, scattered around the studio, are the antithesis of the classical schematisation of the body according to rational rules - the imposition of order upon the chaos of natural observation. So too, do they stand in stubborn opposition to the inheritors of such rules and regulations - the visual codes and catechisms of the fashion and advertising industries: the commercialised body, plucked and primed. Instead, these figures exert a sense of volume, of breath - an organic sense of growth, of fecund matter. The protean body overflows, exceeds its boundaries, burgeons beyond the frame. It pulsates with life, has warm blood and generates heat. Yet there is anonymity here - we are not invited to see specific individuals: these are not portraits. Instead these often curled and foetal poses present us with a generic corporeality and with that, a sense of the temporality of the body - a body which will age, degrade, and eventually pass away. Our guide now wears the visage of a memento mori.

Not all the figures in McGowan's images, however, are anonymous: the artist sometimes uses his own body as a basis for making pictures. In the series FAUST, McGowan's semblance appears in several pictures - Fausthead, Who is my Guide ?, Faust as Mephistopheles. McGowan trained as an illustrator, and this is clearly visible in the Faust works. These pictures have something of the quality of etchings; they seem to testify to a print-maker's eye in the tradition of book illustration. And yet, there is a sense in which these are just as much physical objects as illustrations. McGowan's subsequent work empties the figure of any 'illustrative' purpose - "the subjects have no roles, functions or stories. The narratives contained in my work [...] tell only the story of making a painting" (AM). And it is this self-reflexivity, rooted in a modernist paradigm, which yields the most convincing reading of the work.

The most obvious language spoken by these paintings is that of paint itself. We are reminded of Harold Rosenberg's observation "...what was to go on canvas was not a picture but an event: the painter no longer approached his easel with an image in mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of that encounter." (1952)

These pictures are about the business of putting paint on canvas - about the pure act of painting. There is a hedonism in the open freshness and loose handling of paint - paint draped, spun and looped, paint entangled in spidery arabesques, compressed into pools of colour. A swiftness and deftness of hand creates a richly populated surface - calligraphic and gestural. Acrobatic brush marks, unruly and kinetic, vie with thickly worked and overlaid intervals of tone. Accents and shadings overplay nets and skeins of paint, a landscape at times densely populating the surface, at time sparse, letting the canvas show through. Marks are liberated from any possible representational significance: they record an engagement with the medium. They are in and of themselves.

Here is a 'painter's painter' at work: reveling in the sheer handling of paint, in its viscosity, in its substance. 'I am interested in the different qualities of oil paint - some colours are more opaque or translucent than others - venetian red is very different in its handling from vermillion or burnt sienna, which chromatically is quite close to it' (AM). Passages of paint appear at times lava-like; sometimes jewel encrusted: a detail or close-up might appear very similar to a detail of an 'old master painting' in a conservator's handbook. There is an applause for, and 'truth to', materials - to the beauty of facture. Oil-paint and wax, sawdust and straw, pastel and charcoal, all are decanted into a medley of tactile surface qualities. At times, the process is subtractive rather than additive: materials are removed. These paintings celebrate 'matter' , the 'range of scumbles, glazes, splashes, washes and impasto, the relative 'runniness', stickiness, transparency, and opacity intrinsic to paint. 'I want to explore and express these.' (AM)

And so it is that we begin to see with a 'Magic Eye' - we can see a two dimensional and three dimensional image - both a figure, bearing weight, and a tissue of graphic marks. 'Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.' (Philip Guston) We have a surface of representation - the painting as object - and the suggestion of illusionistic space: strong artificial light moulds bodies, deeply coloured shadows form their contours. Most figures are without distinct backgrounds - they are not situated in a defined three dimensional space - there is no suggestion of context. "I was conscious of a decision to flatten the pictorial space - I wanted to have the figures very much on the surface of the picture, not receding into pictorial space and not creating a background space for them to recede into."(AM) The body appears almost as a map - an aerial landscape: the eye is drafting the territory, scanning the vistas.

The relationship of figure to ground thus becomes one of oscillation: surface and image at times unite, at times divide. Body parts disperse: parts of a figure are disembodied, others crystallize as image and ground conflate. The figure slips between abstraction and representation. We follow - flicking between one and the other. This tension between figure and abstraction also allows for ambiguity - the shapes and abstract configurations sometimes suggest their own references -a crescent like sweep near a head invokes a halo. We are presented with a kind of Rorschach test. On occasions the titles encourage a kind of allegorical reading: titles such as Angel and Fallen intimate a symbolic realm. Like foot-notes, they are there for further reading.

Thus, whilst McGowan surveys the properties of paint, the enterprise is always tied to the representation of the human body. The "quality of paint to come close to its subject (its likeness) is as fundamental, as definitive, as runniness, flatness or its other qualities. I find that duality, that paint can be both paint and subject - paint and flesh simultaneously, exciting." (AM)

To retreat from the pictorial space, what dynamics are at work in the studio? Here we find that the artist is not alone. He and the picture have an audience: the model. McGowan works with models in the studio: working from life rather than from photographs is key to an understanding of his work. A photograph presents an edited vision of the world, already processed into two dimensions - a pre-packaged, frozen 'slice' of 'reality'. In contrast, McGowan's eye works with the dimensions of space and time: both the artist and model change positions; the picture has a past, a present, and a future. Moreover, there is a relationship, a dialogue between subject and artist: the model is not a passive 'object'. S/he has an active role to play: a sensitivity and understanding of the nature of making an image facilitates the creative process - the artist chooses the presence of a person who knows and speaks his language. There is an openness, a sense of collaboration: " in working with models I don't usually dictate a pose but just run through a number of poses until something seems to suggest itself. "(AM)
Picasso once remarked that drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper. By such an analogy, we are left not only with the lines traced by the artist's eye over the model, but also the traces of a succession of 'visitations.' The model too, has his/her own relationship with the image.

There is, of course a third party: the representation itself. Often McGowan works on two or three pictures of the same model at the same time during the same sitting. Each is granted its own personality; its own space for growth. The painting is attributed with almost a life of its own. Model-artist, artist-picture, picture-model: this is the complex triangular set of dynamics played out during the production of work.

The process of making the image is a negotiation between a reading of the model and the writing of the 'text'. It is a kind of juggler's act, held in mid-air. Moreover, each artwork is a unique reading of a constantly changing 'text'. "It has the sense of a work being a 'reading' or performance of the subject. And (..) this reading is not only selective .......but since the subject itself is constantly changing, there is no definite subject. Therefore every picture, every 'reading' is partial and unique, a kind of history of an attempt at cognition, of turning the perceived subject into the language of paint." (AM)

The process of drawing itself, then, is paramount. In the history of art, 'The Painting' is generally understood to be a fait accompli. By contrast, the drawing, historically, occupies a more liminal status - a medium with which to record, to document topographies, and as preparatory sketches - to work out ideas, to ruminate possibilities. As in spoken languages, the conceptual systems that shape drawing styles mediate and order our human understanding of the real world. And different artistic purposes make use of different graphic languages. Thus in learning to draw and to read drawings we are learning ways of grasping meaning in visual reality -(P Rawson, Ency of visual art , p 96) Drawing is the discipline by which an artist may constantly discover the world. It is no coincidence that McGowan works, not only on canvas, but also on paper. He chooses fabriano because it is both tough and fragile. Receptive to marks, it is unforgiving for they cannot be undone. The drawing is then rendered unrepeatable, it cannot be reenacted. The only certainty about this process is that of uncertainty - this is a process full of change, risk and spontaneity. Layers over layers of volatile rendition and scratchings of paint create a palimpsest, a manuscript of observation. The process of making is thus retained, tracking the passage of time: the fluctuations of the eye charted into a permanent record. Perception and cognition joust: trying to know, trying to put down that which is essentially elusive and constantly re-making itself. The process of observation brings with it the anomalies of perception, the vagaries of binocular vision. "Increasingly it seems to me that the suspension of recognition, not so much painting a person, but rather, painting the experience of observing a person' (AM), is what is at stake.

And so each painting, each drawing is a diary, not only of a process, but also of a performance. It is this performative nature of the work - its theatricality - with the immediacy of a dress-rehearsal - that succeeds in endowing each work, no matter how 'finished', with the freshness of the 'sketch.' And just like the writing in a diary, it is autographic.

McGowan's work has moved far away from illustration. His work sits at a juncture, it occupies an interstice: between painting and drawing, between perception and cognition, between subject and surface. Each work negotiates between an engagement with the subject, and with the language of representation, of paint, itself. McGowan is concerned with the nature of communicating a presence, of translation, and equally with disegno, with colore.

Here is an ongoing dialogue, a conversation, with the creative process itself. Francis Bacon described this process as "a highly creative feverishness [.....] when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure. [.....] When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting." Time then, is suspended: we conquer time. Perhaps it is this magnetism which invests McGowan's work with a relentless vision: there is an urgency in the marks, there is a haste in his rendition: "Draw, Antonio, draw – draw and don't waste time !" Michelangelo