Artist Statement

Seeing something new and different for the first time is like no other feeling in the world. For me the best way to capture this feeling is through paint, by trying to make a conscious and an immediate inscription of that image and feeling to memory. It could be a landscape, architecture, conveying a vastness or intimacy, a time of day or a weather condition. In painting these urban and rural scenes I make preliminarily life drawings, take colour swatches and use photography, which helps keep a freshness of first sight information. It allows me to relive that feeling and have a closer connection to a space. This turns into a closer dialogue and understanding from eye to memory to my favoured medium, oil paint. I start by composing a work from my sketches, draft out a foundation and then manipulate. Pushing, pulling, blurring, zoning in and improvising on different aspects within the composition. This likens my experience to a child in the sweet shop. Oil paint for me has stood the test of time and resonates memorable longevity. It’s a physical medium that embroils itself naturally in the substance of things. It can be applied and expressed in many a feel. Fatty, fleshy, fragmented, lucid, opaque or translucent all of which can and have their own benefits resulting in triumph, failure and in happy accidents. I want to engage and work the viewers eyes, into a journey embodying a sense of wandering and the potential of discovery in arrested moments. Finding pathways, obstacles, junctions in composition. Colour and tone are transformed into opportunities with each stroke of my brush. My goal is to compose my vision of nature’s beauty. Taking the viewer and stretching their eyes further, which in these mobile phone times is becoming a rarer experience. Wandering, scanning, resting and most importantly seeing rather than looking.