CONTEMPORARY PAINTER

My abstract paintings concern the felt experience of my body and psyche in the Cornish landscape.  As described by Ithell Colquhoun, the living landscape is where the unseen energies of the menhirs and stone circles are felt through the body and mind, and my work aims to transcribe my experiences through the language of oil paint on canvas.  

I paint listening to music, utilising the rhythm to enter a state of flow, of unconscious competence, following phenomenologically the marks on the canvas as they come into being, as if they were characters in a play.  This collection of mark making employs various techniques using brushes, card, and other tools to create diverse strokes, and playing with combinations of painterly approaches.  My process is instinctive and involves applying layers of thin paint onto the canvas delineated by multiple strokes quickly and rhythmically applied.  Saturated colour is then subdued by further layers of tertiary hues which obscure and reveal underlying earlier marks, followed by further application of mixed media including spray paint and oil pastel.  Finally, thick paint adds to the symphony of the composition and draws attention to the surface and the materiality of the painting as object and presence in the world  

The surface of the work is of most interest to me, where micro markings in layers pull you into an intimate inspection of the painting, and playing with the scale of brush marks as large sweeps of colour which are mixed on the surface through the making of the mark itself, break up the detailed multiplicity of hatching.  The eye of the viewer is invited to wander around the territory as if in the terrain of another parallel universe to everyday reality.  This alternative land aims to map out the psychological space of the self grounded in, and open to nature, where flow, tension and conflict exist simultaneously in an ever evolving process.