Insert Shape (After Matisse) #1 (2021)

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Henri Matisse turned to scissors and coloured paper for expediency to produce his celebrate cut-outs, which surely derive their energy from that directness. In thinking about my approach to The Kick-About No.38, I wanted to identify an equivalency for Matisse’s scissors – a ubiquitous tool – and the speediness of producing shapes, for then combining in different ways. So it was I began my image-making with Powerpoint – oh yes, the infamous ‘presentation-maker’, notorious as software for producing will-sapping slides to be shown in under-ventilated rooms.

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One of the application’s off-the-peg tools is ‘Insert Shapes’ – which allows you to draw simple shapes with a quick drag of your mouse, and then colour and outline them as you see fit. I used Powerpoint to produce collections of basic shapes – circles, rectangles and squares (and later, some of Powerpoint’s cookie-cutter plant form icons) – and then brought these ‘cut-outs’ into Photoshop, where I set about layering them one on top of the other with as much immediacy as I could muster.

I started simply at first, with just circles and squares and some dotted outlines, and very quickly lots of nice things happened, with the layering producing some effortlessly nostalgic effects. My mouth began to water a bit, wishing I could occupy a few more timelines, wherein I was a textile artist, or designer of vast tiled murals in brand spanking-new tube stations, or Great Exhibition-style posters celebrating the ‘shock of the new’.

It perhaps won’t surprise you to hear I got rather carried away, so there’s a few more examples of my fantasia on a theme of Matisse-meets-Powerpoint to share over the coming days.

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