Itsy Bitsy Painting

I’m a painter and falconer based in the Scottish Highlands and my practice reflects the duality of pursuing these very different occupations. The hawk flying high in the landscape represents freedom, but this is freedom completely dependent on its perfectly designed form and structure. A painting comprises many brush marks, each part of the whole. So the hawk with his feathers, coloured, shaped and exactly placed. The introspection and confinement of studio practice directly contrasts with flying hawks free in open landscape and this is perhaps reflected in the different approaches I’ve taken to painting. Works can be either abstract or figural, gestural or uniform but always underpinned by an exploration of paint as a substance in terms of colour, texture and surface. Open space, cloudscapes, night skies, flight and movement are interpreted in paint by 'making the marks move'. The painting as a ‘made’ object’ is fundamental and some works recycle sections of old work so that the canvas, instead of remaining concealed beneath paint, becomes a surface in itself as well as being integral to the work. Works in oil are unframed on box canvas in order to retain brush marks at the edges and emphasise the work as ‘object’ not ‘window’.