Asking Questions
My paintings are colourful, multilayered, textured images responding to place and journey. They emerge from a synthesis of imagination and experience and reflect my feelings and thoughts about the liminal space between nature and human-made structures, between growth and decay, between our inner and outer worlds. For me, painting helps explore and express experiences and internal intuitions that are hard to describe in words alone. In essence the process of painting helps tell a story.
My visual inspirations are wide ranging. Some come from savouring the worn and faded elements of human intervention in the landscape; from, say, discarded farm machinery or buildings, to waning, rusting industrial installations; from ancient paths worn over time, to weathered fence posts wrapped in barbed wire. Others come from nature herself, the twisted history of a trees, the fresh emergence of new growth, or the secret rustling in a hedge as I walk past.
My internal frame of reference is informed by many years working in psychological therapies. I am fascinated by hints of beliefs and our internal record of past experience, elements of which, exist outside of our conscious awareness yet influence us in so many ways.
Paintings then emerge from my intuitive sense of these inner landscapes. I’m often “listening“ to the nudges and the felt sense of my experiences. I have learned to let these guide my work without needing to know the outcome. For me this level of uncertainty is both unnerving and yet hugely creative. Perhaps you can relate?
I enjoy walking in varied landscapes both urban and in nature. This provides me with a powerful impetus for my creative process. I’m often making marks in sketchbooks as I walk, to register observations, sensations, movements, thoughts and feelings. I may take photographs that record a particular shape, pattern or situation. Back home, my sketchbooks and photography become springboards to start to explore ideas and possibilities on paper, canvas or wood panel.
In this process I use multiple layers of collage, paint and mark making that build textures, create forms, patterns, shapes, gestures, lines and edges. Suggested avenues to follow reveal themselves, others are abandoned. Sometimes layers are scraped back, sanded down and discarded, yet elements and hints remain, rediscovered as part of subsequent layers.
I love this idea of palimpsest, something reused or altered yet retaining visible signs of what went before. I see this as central to my process.
My Painting Process.
The direction of a painting, for me, is not predetermined. At the beginning the outcome is unknown, and for some time, ambiguous; I am constantly asking “what if…..?” I like the tension that comes by being bounded and contained by the medium and the palette and yet uncertain as to where the painting process will take me. Gradually form and identity begin to emerge from this, as the composition resolves and I begin to understand what the work will be.
I get excited about what you see in my images. What do they provoke in you? I’d love to hear how you interpret my work…..?
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I believe that owning and engaging with unique original art is a reflection of our individual personal subjectivity. It helps us know who we are and how we see ourselves.