Blue Iris (Messenger of the Ancient Greek Gods) Painting

I was born in Bristol, England in 1951. I studied art in Bristol and Birmingham, graduating in 1978. I then lived in London for 25 years where I ran a dual career as a painter and as a manager of environmental projects. In 2006 I moved to Piemonte in northern Italy where I live in a converted farmhouse, working in my studio which was formerly the hayloft. My work is about my response to the colour, space and light in the landscape. My aim is to paint the power and existence of the landscape, not the view of it. I am inspired by the dominance of nature over man, but also the marks the man makes in the landscape. I am equally interested in the detail of nature and am excited by plant life, from the extraordinary wild flowers of a Piemonte Spring to the flowers in my garden. I work in my studio from sketches and photographs made in the landscape. I usually work up larger drawings from my sketches, then start my paintings with a series of acrylic washes and building up thicker layers of either acrylic or oil. I like to explore the quality of the paint, often scraping paint off of the canvas revealing subtle textures and colours beneath and contrasting these with opaque textured paint. Although I use my drawings as a basis for my paintings I find that the painting takes usually takes on its own direction and can move away entirely from the original drawings. For me this is all a part of the process of painting and discovering the real subject matter. My work is moving towards greater abstraction as I explore the use of symbolic rather than figurative mark making and different ways of applying paint another media to canvas, but it is always representational of nature.