In the Shallows Painting

The garden is my inspiration for my art. I work both in pastel and oil. Pastels require minimal tools, just paper and a stick of pure powdered pigments held together by a binder. I find pastel an extremely tactile medium that sits comfortably between drawing and painting. It’s a good medium to rapidly capture colour and changing light conditions in the garden. When I paint in oil, I try to capture the luminosity of the garden; I am interested in the texture of the oil paint on the canvas. I like to build up a “heavy” texture, which creates a focus of interest. Thin glazes produce an area of emptiness within the canvas. These glazes allow light to appear to radiate from within the painting. I frequently scrape and sand down the paint surface, and I then repaint the canvas, the result of subsequent scars on the canvas are crucial to the overall painting and are like calligraphic marks that are inherent markings, just like punctuation is essential to a written page. These marks can be dominant or subtle, depending on the layering of paint and washes. Sometimes, they can be so delicate that they are only faintly visible, veiled under layers of paint. On the other hand, they can be pulsing, defined and palpable in the foreground. Viewers often find my brushwork seductive, and they trail their fingers over the canvas to gently trace faint lines so delicate that they are hardly visible. My future work is on the verge of becoming semi-abstract.