"My art is my way of responding to the spirit that rolls through all things, and answer to my passion for wild, unspoiled places"
I make paintings that evoke landscape, at times with an adherence to reality, at other times favouring reduction to abstracted colour fields. They hint at some of the ways we interact with landscape - notions of the vastness of cosmic space to small intimate moments of particular light in our personal environments. Or at times, abstracted images from our imaginations and memories.
The commonality between them is a specific kind of light, a radiance between darker shapes. I select times of the day or weather conditions to evoke an atmosphere of melancholic grace. I give equal importance to every element in the painting, ensuring no hierarchy of meaning.
My paintings can be devoid of detail but often create a small visual barrier, beyond which the viewer is rewarded with an infinite expanse of space. Empty wild places, often stark and sublime, carrying a hint of ominous beauty. My sources are increasingly diverse. I work from life and in the landscape, on the open moor or marsh. The more personal view from a kitchen window, blurred photography and frozen scenes television or film.
I am interested in liminal space - places between places, edges and borders. I perceive borders not just as physical demarcations on a map, but as complex symbols that define, divide, and connect us. Borders are multifaceted; they represent safety and exclusion, identity and division, freedom and restriction.
I am portraying the nuanced and often contradictory nature of the spaces we inhabit.
