Near Oliphant Painting

I paint what is around me – downtown Hamilton, nearby landscapes, and the people close to me. For rural paintings, I often work on location, while urban paintings and portraits generally develop in the studio from photographs or video stills. My impetus to make a painting comes from the everyday physical world - I see something that captures my attention, often mundane but surprising in its beauty. However, once I commit to a painting, it’s the paint itself that engages me. What I paint - the subject - is not irrelevant, but it becomes less important than the marks I make on the surface of a board. My goal is to paint what I see, but not copy what I see. I am interested in creating a work that is realistic and recognizable, but I am not aiming for "high realism". I try to get at the truth of something, while letting the paint itself be the protagonist in the story. That may be through impasto, visible brush strokes, drips, scumbled layers of broken colour and abstract passages. Water and reflections are a source of delight and fascination. That might be a swamp, a rainy road, a swimmer, even water in a glass -- any of these are fair game for a painting. While the subjects may seem quite different, for me they are strongly tied together through the paint handling, as the paint itself almost becomes the subject.