A short statement about my work

                                                          

    

     

I attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (1976-79) and In 1979  was awarded the Vandlheur, Sparks, and Leverhulme Scholarships to attend the Royal Academy Schools.

At both the Ruskin and at the Royal Academy Schools my training was "classical" in relation to traditional practice, including painting printmaking and drawing techniques, methods and materials, design and theories.

Jane Greenham also taught me how to prepare gesso grounds and paint tempera panels , also to paint with Distempera: pure pigment and size.It was an unforgettable moment when I first saw the beautiful pure matt colour painted onto raw linen, I have been using distempera ever since. 

I work from real life observation rather than from photographs or memory because I find so much more information and inspiration in the process of looking. The way I perceive colour probably has the greatest importance in my work, as well as my love of composition.

I believe that the influence of the photographic image, which has for many years been feeding back into painting, is something that needs to be questioned in relation to the understanding and honouring what and how we see, perceive, and remember, of the world around us.  I am certain that the majority of people now accept the photographic image as depicting “reality”, whereas in fact it captures, for the most part, only degrees of light falling on objects.

I try to free myself of the notion that the camera records the world accurately. This belief is not necessarily about emotional “truth” but significantly visual truth.

 A lot of my painting has less emphasis on “modelling” and might often not appear to be “lit” from a direct source. It is important for me to focus on objects and colour as I see and experience it/them.

An orange (for instance) generates orangeness, as an intensity of local colour, and as a roundness of form and solidity. I focus on these characteristics. I use just enough tone to give the subject weight and three dimensionality, but mostly I try to be true to my lived experience of seeing/remembering the orange.

 I use gouache and distempera (pure pigment and size) on paper or canvas. The matt velvety texture and the quality of the colour in distempera has often provided a successful way for me to express local colour without too much modelling, gleam, or chiaroscuro.

I also use oil on canvas or board. Oil has a marvellous intensity of colour, is easy to mix the exact colour needed, and the great bonus is that there is no need to protect it when dry, so no glass needed between the paint and the viewer. By now my oil paintings are almost indistinguishable from the distempera ones.      

MY PHILOSOPHY AS AN ARTIST

In retrospect my philosophy is something which is evolving and changing. I am interested in the writings of the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins and his religious and metaphysical convictions which discuss “isness” and instress”

 “Hopkins felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe ‘selves,’ that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness.”

Quote from Stephen Greenblatt

 I believe that we are each drawn to different and specific colours, scents, forms, materials, music, lights, moods, and people and that these “attractions” are formed because at both a metaphysical and physical level we “recognise” or “connect with” particular energetic frequencies which resonate with our own, and that when we experience this harmonic it will engender a feeling of belonging, of recognition, of pleasure and of significance. I believe that all works of art can generate and emit energies which resonate and harmonise and which can literally be a positive force in their environment. This means that works of art can generate powerful energetic and positive energy.

 I believe it is terribly important to remember that painting is a process, not a production, and that the energy and intention which goes into the creation of a painting is extremely important. A painting is a by-product of a mediation and interaction with the world and, for me, with the shapes and colours of the subject matter. If this process is not nourishing and bringing real excitement and joy as well as a challenge and a struggle, then why do it? The process of making work can be really deeply rewarding and worthwhile and I believe that this will be evident in the work both visually and vibrationally.