About the Originals

 

My work is currently exploring an almost ‘back to basics’ approach to what truly drives me to create images . . . They are a ‘stepping away’ from the frequent obsession with detail in my work .

I am loosening the grip that has always sought to bend the media and materials to my will or vision . . . a more minimum interference approach that desires less aggravation and sheer driven intent in the way I work . This is a condition I often find restraining and thus less capable of daring to take the hugely necessary risks that facilitate an environment in which you are always allowed to grow and expand your skills and knowledge of the ideas , materials and stocks you use to create your images .

 

There is also a desire to share my fascination with the alchemy of inks, pigments and solutions that I employ. A hope that by relinquishing a little control it will allow the media and materials own voice and particular characteristics to shine through, for they are truly immense and infinite in their own right.

 

One of my favourite painters speaks of her paints being “a much better painter than she is” and I enormously empathise with this. I all too often totally lose my rag with something I am working on and ‘cast it down ’ to the floor only to find that gravity, force mass motion and my solution have conspired to produce a mark or series of marks far more interesting than those I have spent days trying to actually paint !

 

My recent paintings are also a ‘stepping away’ from colour . In a modern world so relentlessly and intensely saturated with a constant barrage of imagery and colour I find myself returning to my

long standing fascination with black and white or at least near monochromatic imagery . Most of my primary artistic influences over the years follow a strong monochromatic aesthetic and this was also perhaps reinforced by my studies in black and white photography . 

 

Perhaps more importantly in the works I am currently working on is a notion I had one day on the hill . . .  It was a blanket fog, and whilst stood there feeling overwhelmed with awe and deeply inspired to start sketching the vague billowing forms around me, it occurred to me that neither colour or detail were key characters in this adumbrative and ethereal landscape around me. The climatic conditions of the day had reduced all visual elements to a hundred shades of grey, and it has always been these kinds of conditions that I find most breathtaking and moving, waves in a sea fog, the hint of a coastline, gently moving treetops in mist, the soft line of a hill, the point at which atop some peak or section of moorland that you cannot tell land from sky. Its as though my senses are most elevated by a ‘suggestion’ of what is there, by what I cannot quite see .