This body of work involves the enigmatic dialogue between the tangible world around us. I am driven by emotion and a sense of feeling when producing the work. My aim is to encapsulate a sensuous surface suggestive of nature through materiality and
abstraction. I am influenced by the elemental quality of nature and the effect time has on our landscape, evident in weathering and decay.
The consolidated palette and marks elude to a dialogue where the emotional intensity is imbued in my work, which is the result of a sustained investigation into charting my own reactions to the natural world that surrounds us. The embraced dualities of the earthy tones are juxtaposed with synthetic colours, which feed in from every day life including the myriad of visual pollution and plethora of technology we’re unescapably surrounded by.
There are nuances between the paintings, especially in the formal qualities that have been carefully thought about. I wanted to play with style to highlight the multi faceted landscape we now live in, depicted in the pictorial representation and the difference in
gesture. This conceptual and ironic notion of exploring stylistic divergence is highly romantic. Showing how incoherent reality really is without representing it naturalistically.
Using layers of paint and abstract forms to build a range of evocative atmospheres, impetuous splatters and sculptural layers of paint invite viewers to soak in these melancholic emotive and ethereal surroundings. The evanescence of memory seems to whisper through the work, revealing hidden depths of my own experience. I have tried to articulate analogies of human interference with the landscape in the work, by juxtaposing elements of the man – made depicted in the synthetic colours with the organic, in the earthy, umber tones. I have worked with a diverse range of mediums; cold wax, beeswax, resin, grit as well as oil mediums and glazes to achieve a surface that is rich in sensuality. I prepared my surfaces differently by sizing, then using a layer of oil primer or thixotropic followed by the vibrant ground colour. I was able to manipulate the brushstroke allowing the process of reflection to feed in, this led to the representational aspect gradually disappearing. The brushstrokes became looser, portraying the forces of nature in the mark, a notion that finds expression in the vertical forms that reach defiantly through the majority of the composition in Interconnected and Incoherent Reality. I have referred to artists such as The Boyle Family, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Lanyon and Clyfford Still for inspiration. Still’s work features characteristically dramatic relationships between his expansive fields of color that could denote caves or vast abysses momentarily illuminated by crackling flares of light. Similar to Rothko’s vast expanse of space, which is what Author Robert Rosenblum refers to as the ‘Modern Sublime’, since Friedrich. I enjoyed seeing Mondrian’s seascapes at the Kunstmusuem in Basel which shocked me at first as they were painted in a quasi romantic style. But the paintings drew me in to the monumental depiction of elemental phenomena. Similar to the experience I had when standing in front of Hippolyte Boulenger’s neo impressionistic seascape at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels.
Reduced to Rubble was a show installed by contemporary artist Terry Setch at the Flowers Gallery, London. He uses artistic paraphernalia found on the beach of his hometown in Wales welded onto canvas with polypropylene to highlight the fact the landscape is polluted. The two artists that had significant influence on my practice were Andreas Eriksson and Per Kirkeby. Kirkeby is a painter of eminent sensuality, creating synchronous layered canvases filled with prodigious detail and animated by an unequaled material quality of color. I worked with different and challenging compositional elements especially the relationship between foreground and background; light and dark. This became the signature of the work, working over cadmium orange, scarlett lake and yellow lake grounds with transparent colours such as terre verte, and green umbers. The colour became an integral part of the work and the understanding in creating it. Terre Verte (Green Earth) has been described as the ‘’workhorse of the palette’. The main compounds were iron clay, manganese dioxide, alumina and silica. Categorization of these pigments refers to the origin of the materials being “dug from the earth, which was the influence behind the painting Dug from the Earth.
abstraction. I am influenced by the elemental quality of nature and the effect time has on our landscape, evident in weathering and decay.
The consolidated palette and marks elude to a dialogue where the emotional intensity is imbued in my work, which is the result of a sustained investigation into charting my own reactions to the natural world that surrounds us. The embraced dualities of the earthy tones are juxtaposed with synthetic colours, which feed in from every day life including the myriad of visual pollution and plethora of technology we’re unescapably surrounded by.
There are nuances between the paintings, especially in the formal qualities that have been carefully thought about. I wanted to play with style to highlight the multi faceted landscape we now live in, depicted in the pictorial representation and the difference in
gesture. This conceptual and ironic notion of exploring stylistic divergence is highly romantic. Showing how incoherent reality really is without representing it naturalistically.
Using layers of paint and abstract forms to build a range of evocative atmospheres, impetuous splatters and sculptural layers of paint invite viewers to soak in these melancholic emotive and ethereal surroundings. The evanescence of memory seems to whisper through the work, revealing hidden depths of my own experience. I have tried to articulate analogies of human interference with the landscape in the work, by juxtaposing elements of the man – made depicted in the synthetic colours with the organic, in the earthy, umber tones. I have worked with a diverse range of mediums; cold wax, beeswax, resin, grit as well as oil mediums and glazes to achieve a surface that is rich in sensuality. I prepared my surfaces differently by sizing, then using a layer of oil primer or thixotropic followed by the vibrant ground colour. I was able to manipulate the brushstroke allowing the process of reflection to feed in, this led to the representational aspect gradually disappearing. The brushstrokes became looser, portraying the forces of nature in the mark, a notion that finds expression in the vertical forms that reach defiantly through the majority of the composition in Interconnected and Incoherent Reality. I have referred to artists such as The Boyle Family, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Lanyon and Clyfford Still for inspiration. Still’s work features characteristically dramatic relationships between his expansive fields of color that could denote caves or vast abysses momentarily illuminated by crackling flares of light. Similar to Rothko’s vast expanse of space, which is what Author Robert Rosenblum refers to as the ‘Modern Sublime’, since Friedrich. I enjoyed seeing Mondrian’s seascapes at the Kunstmusuem in Basel which shocked me at first as they were painted in a quasi romantic style. But the paintings drew me in to the monumental depiction of elemental phenomena. Similar to the experience I had when standing in front of Hippolyte Boulenger’s neo impressionistic seascape at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels.
Reduced to Rubble was a show installed by contemporary artist Terry Setch at the Flowers Gallery, London. He uses artistic paraphernalia found on the beach of his hometown in Wales welded onto canvas with polypropylene to highlight the fact the landscape is polluted. The two artists that had significant influence on my practice were Andreas Eriksson and Per Kirkeby. Kirkeby is a painter of eminent sensuality, creating synchronous layered canvases filled with prodigious detail and animated by an unequaled material quality of color. I worked with different and challenging compositional elements especially the relationship between foreground and background; light and dark. This became the signature of the work, working over cadmium orange, scarlett lake and yellow lake grounds with transparent colours such as terre verte, and green umbers. The colour became an integral part of the work and the understanding in creating it. Terre Verte (Green Earth) has been described as the ‘’workhorse of the palette’. The main compounds were iron clay, manganese dioxide, alumina and silica. Categorization of these pigments refers to the origin of the materials being “dug from the earth, which was the influence behind the painting Dug from the Earth.