What can you say about painting landscapes that hasn’t been said already? It is after all, a personal response to things of nature. This work is my response.
I love painting landscapes, but often I don’t want a landscape to be a landscape at all, but merely an expression of it. So, after over 30 years of living, walking and painting in both South Shropshire and the Welsh Borders, as well as walking in the mountains of Europe, this work is an immediate, searching, emotional, and sometimes playful contemplation between myself and the great outdoors.
Some may call my work abstract or expressionist because the subject may seem ambiguous or indistinct. But working outdoors in all weathers allows for rapid and responsive mark making, where the powers of emotional suggestion come into play. Using a large brush, I paint quickly, producing marks with a sense of urgency, I have to capture that moment in time somehow. Often, I will produce as many as 20 small charcoal and watercolour sketches and revisit a place many times. These sketches become integral to my experience of a Place.
In the studio, I do not usually refer directly to the outdoor sketches. Instead paintings become evocations from memory, suggestions and thoughts. They relate to observations made during my walks through colour, line, marks and rhythm of paint. I work in a spontaneous way, and usually several paintings are worked on during the process. All paintings are completed in one sitting.
Yet whether remembering, recasting, or inventing anew, all are a glimpse of my exterior life made visible on canvas and paper.
I have won a number of prestigious competitions, exhibited widely and have work in various collections throughout the UK
Previous to my painting career, I spent many years working in advertising and design agencies.