Road to Beachy Head Painting

Daily walking is something that I took up seriously while still living in the Brecon Beacons almost 25 years ago. Around the same time that I started painting. I began to realise that being out in an environment, in all seasons, and in all weathers, created an awareness and sensitivity to it that I don't think is possible for me by simply arriving somewhere and attempting to make a creative response to it. Over the weeks, months and years, watching the light morphing; the rain falling; even the earth changing in colour, it's all absorbed by my subconscious. I draw when I'm out, sometimes using colour, usually not. These drawings are like 'note-making' for me. Together, these forms of looking seem gradually to build a language of colour, line, form and texture, so that when I'm painting in my studio I can call on this visual vocabulary. Very often my paintings are collages of a hundred different memories of being outside, and immersed in it all. An intuitive and emotional response to a landscape I have become preoccupied with. My intension is that the paintings take on their own form; distilled memories, and an entity in their own right. I have long admired the work of David Tress; Len Tabner; Gail Harvey, and more recently the ceramics of Barry Stedman. My paintings on canvas are acrylic, initially applied in thinned washes, building up the layers, sometimes drawn or scratched into. In my works on paper I use a combination of media. Having initially trained in Constructed Textiles, texture remains a key expressive element within my work.