So I'm sitting in a booth in a quiet bar in Manchester's northern quarter. It's early afternoon midweek. I've got my beer. I've got my ready salted. I've got my paper. But these are just props,camouflage. My dictaphone, my wire, thats the tool, thats the reason I'm here.

Day one was a complete disaster but I learned some important lessons. Do not attempt to use a recording device with a built in microphone in a pocket full of loose change and keys. Do not compound the problems inherent in this method by doing it whilst wandering round the old Trafford mega store with son and daughter in tow. The only dialogue I might have recorded had it been audible, would have been, "which one", "that one", "next"and "how much?"But they were off school and the new away kit was out.

I digress "there's one man who really scares me, there's something about him and I felt it before I'd spoken to him or knew anything about him".

Things are looking up back in the bar and I feel like Joe Pistone/Donnie Brasco. The tape is running and one of the three women who are now sitting in the booth behind me has got a lot to say about teaching English, about her degree , about the way it feels to be locked inside a classroom full of sex offenders during a prison riot, about leaving the country and converting to catholicism. I'm making field recordings to add to the hours of chaotic television and radio recordings I've already made to use as source material for a series of new paintings. Hours of bland, thought provoking, stupid and surreal human communication. Rich in non sequiturs and unfinished sentences as a result of scanning the frequencies like a maniac in a vain attempt to capture everything thats going on at a given moment.

I was sitting in the lounge at home one Sunday last winter, trying to stop myself listening to several conversations at once( i'm sure my eyes glaze over when i'm doing this and it can't be much fun for the person i'm supposed to be in conversation with)when I began to visualize the sentences floating across one another, following different trajectories, stretching, compressing and varying in colour. The first studies were too dense. The image became impenetrable like a heavy woven fabric as the words piled on top of each other. I eventually found a way of working that brought me closer to the thingsI had originally seen, using oil and oil pastels and multiple glazes to build the layers of text.

As the work progressed through the year it began to suggest land and sea scapes, I went with it and made several works based on paintings by JMW Turner , The burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, Rough sea and Norham Castle, Sunrise. This has lead me to think future output should be more site specific the text that is used to construct the landscape could be derived from it in some way. Look out for a series of bar paintings late 2009 and to the lady behind me, I hope you made it to Spain, you deserve it and I owe you a drink, or a painting.

John Squire
October 2008