“As a painter I am continually thrilled by what paint can do, how it can evoke time, place, change, emotion, atmosphere.”
Artist Statement
To varying degrees of focus, landscape is an important element in my work and I am fascinated by transient effects of light and weather and the ever-moving, ever-changing nature of sea and sky.
Rather than descriptive portraits of places, the paintings are more an attempt to distil a memory of a space, with its light, weather and sounds. Perhaps I could even say that they are more about time than place, drawing on the ability of painting to both still time and evoke its passing.
When moments of time catch and fragment, those pieces become memories like little pockets of time, place and experience. These moments are peppered throughout my work and I also hope to elicit memories or feelings of recognition in someone viewing the work.
Increasingly my paintings are also about exploring a need for space and pause; both an acknowledgement and acceptance of the world we now inhabit (with its layers of ever-changing technology, fleeting images and vicarious experiences) and also a need to leave that behind at times, to connect with something more elemental and suspended but at the same time tangibly real.
Using a very wide range of media, the paintings begin life on the floor, building up fluid layers of poured paint and all the unpredictability that brings. In subsequent layers, I try to direct and harness this unpredictability to some extent, responding to the marks and to my own sense of the space that emerges. Gradually I refine the techniques, adding, taking away, scraping back and adding again, revealing marks from every stage of the process. My painting practice is active, expressive, direct, but there are also quieter more analytical moments of gently directing fluid paint or carefully sanding back to find and place earlier marks alongside later ones.
What Inspires Me
As well as experiencing the landscape through drawing and painting, I love to walk, run and swim outside and find that all elements of my life whether external or internal find their way into my paintings. Travel has always been one of my passions and I have painted in the Himalayas, Canadian Rockies and Kenya’s Rift Valley, as well as closer to home in many parts of Britain and Europe.
