paintings

All of these works are the result of my ongoing efforts to get hold of visual reality and to grapple with its endless mysteries. I want to be sensitive to what I see and feel about my subject. I want to be aware of what media can do when employed honestly, openly, and urgently. And with a sense of adventure. Every genuine encounter I have with subject and media results in a series of discoveries and realisations.

Painting as a practice demands patience and diligence. It also demands that artists maintain, as the writer Jed Pearl has so eloquently said, a commitment to “shaping and deepening and clarifying the qualities that mean the most to them.” When I am standing before the motif in the landscape, working en plein air, or am in the studio in the presence of the model, I am working with a variety of limitations: in the landscape, the light changes constantly, (especially here in the British Isles), the general and the specific often seem to be in a state of flux as one looks back and forth between the subject and the painting (this was one of Cézanne’s greatest challenges).Then there is the matter of complexity. I can’t say everything I want to about the thing I’m painting, while I’m painting, so what do I choose to say? While working in the landscape, I tend to turn and walk away from the painting about every ten minutes. I stand and focus my eyes on something in another direction entirely. Maybe I even close my eyes for a few minutes… then I return to the piece and attempt to see it with some kind of objectivity… in the end, one must trust one’s instincts, jump in, and not be too precious—try to keep things fresh, alive.… In the studio, working with a portrait, one has more control over the environment, but then the problem becomes being too controlling… perhaps knowing too much beforehand…with direct observation, the best policy is to move as deeply as one can into concentration, enjoying both the seeing and the responding, and enjoying the employment of the tools being used. Be experimental, take risks— it doesn’t matter, really, whether the handling is “loose” or tight”, that is NOT the issue… what matters is that nothing is carved in stone…