Recent Work (2023)

When I speak of the storied heart of painting I’m not saying that a painting is an illustration of a story, or that painting requires a logical, linear, rules-based literalness to read it.

Let’s be clear, paintings no more travel from A-B by the most direct route than we do as we walk through, and engage with, place.

Place is a remembered landscape regardless of whether we’re in it at that moment, or drawing from it back in the Studio. We are marked by place. Place made. The marks we make when painting are a respectful nod to the affect place has upon us. When words won’t cut it, it is painting, not prose, that can reflect that precious moment of being held in place, and be-longing.

The great strength of a painting for me comes from its ambiguity. Paintings have no beginning, middle or end. Paintings are fluid, they are a lived dialogue with…

You can speak of the musicality of a painting, as ideas of contrast, tone and harmony all have their place and help keep discordant noise at bay.

You can speak of the geology of a painting. Strata over strata laid down with time. Layer over layer, detail after detail, eroded half hidden fragments surfacing. Painting articulating more than the surface veneer, magnificent and moving (or muddy) though that might be.

Painting reflects the walk. To walk in, look at, listen to and immerse yourself in the landscape is as dynamic and involving a process as painting.

We are our stories and the landscape wants to listen to the tales we tell, and wants to tell a fair few stories of its own, if only we have heart enough to hear them.

Walk. Listen to tree and the breeze, birds and bees, to the flowing stream of wind-blown grasses and only then take up your brush and begin.