Statement
Artist Statement
I paint.
That's it, that's all! However in today's world, collectors, galleries, social media, in fact everyone, seem to want more from an artist than just their work. So, although I would prefer to confine myself to my first sentence above, I will attempt to elucidate further, on what motivates and drives me, to keep painting and drawing and creating my work on a daily basis.
For many years I painted directly from my subject matter and although I still draw from a live model often, today I am purely an abstract painter.
I consider my paintings to be expressive diagrams which examine and pose the question of what it means to be alive. This is the ultimate content in my work expressed through pure visual form.
Although my work is non-objective or abstract, it is often inspired by things I observe in the world around me and also from the world art, which gives me so much pleasure. I draw from the landscape, and regularly from a life model, but I never intentionally use figuration in my work. If I become aware that something in a painting is reminiscent of something then I have to change it.
Our lives are full of rhythms created by the passage of time, the weather, the changing seasons, our appetites for food and sex, our shifting mental, emotional and physical states. I obsessively record many of these aspects of life and the patterns generated together with my drawings from observation, form the basis of my work.
I like to surprise myself, and so mostly work directly and intuitively straight onto the canvas. I often begin a piece of work with only the vaguest of feelings about what I am going to do. It might be a certain colours, or shapes that form my starting point, but once I have begun it seems to be the work itself that drives me.
I usually consider a painting to be finished when it thrills me, when the image seems to be full of life, light and vigour. I aim to achieve a dynamic equilibrium, where hard crisp linear and geometric elements are balanced against awkward, indefinite painterly passages. Above all the colours must sing, in harmony and discord!
