My passion for painting and my love of nature are intimately connected; I love to get out into the landscape in all weathers and soak up the sights, sounds and atmosphere of the natural world. I am particularly inspired by the light, colours and textures of the Malvern Hills, which are close to my home and my heart.
When painting landscapes I work mainly in my studio using the sketches and photographs that I gather in my frequent walks. Each painting is an individual voyage of discovery for me and I try to see my surroundings in fresh way, to evoke a sense of character in the landscape and express the wonder I experience in the everyday.
Sometimes my work has an otherworldly realism, other times my landscapes are abstracted through colour, form and texture. I try to bring energy, movement and drama into my work through a vigorous painting process: by building up layers of paint using brushes, palette knifes, spattering, rubbing back, scratching and scraping away to create a textural surface with depth and history.
At first glance it appears that my art has two distinct characters and ostensibly my abstracts and my landscapes appear quite different. However each inspires and informs the other – I was an abstract painter before a figurative painter - and my experimental approach and passion for colour, texture and composition is just as evident in my purely abstract paintings.
When painting abstracts I often work in an intuitive and gestural way, starting with free mark-making then burying and unearthing marks, colours and textures, revealing glimpses of hidden colours through the layered surface. Sometimes my work incorporate elements of collage and printing within the textured surface; I like to see where the mood takes me rather than developing a ‘house style’ and sticking to it.
Whether representational or purely abstract, my experimental approach to painting aims to find the sweet-spot between chaos and control, where mistakes are discoveries and a painting emerges through creative play.