"By the seaside" Painting

I am a contemporary landscape painter living and working in England. My paintings are in-between representationalism and abstraction. I am interested in the transition from the recalled reality of a place or a memory to a distorted and enhanced reality which happens during the painting process. I work from sketches, reference photos and from images in my head. My work is also influenced by the many years I spent in West Africa and South America in my youth - the colours, the music, the scents of the flowers, the heat and the sheer exoticness of it all impact my work to this day.
When I am in the landscape the lines, ridges, rivers, hills, fields and flowers really speak to me and I want to absorb their beauty and try to recreate this later in paint. Colour is a very important element in my work as it so well expresses emotion – joy, sadness, nostalgia, exuberance, beauty.
I am drawn to beauty of all kinds – be it the beauty of nature, or the beauty of the human body, or the beauty of shapes, forms and colours and how they all fit together.
When I paint, my intention is to re-create this beauty somehow, in order to capture and evoke that same feeling of how it was, so I often paint spontaneously, while the memory is still fresh. In my paintings, I move intuitively between the real and the imaginary, often creating an ambiguous image which allows the viewer to put their own interpretation and memories into the painting.
After a BA (Honours) Fine Art Degree course at the University of Hertfordshire (2003) I have exhibited widely all over the UK and also in Berlin in January 2020. My paintings are in many private collections in the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, USA and Dubai.