Tropical Hideaway Painting

I am a British Artist born in London and currently based at Wimbledon Art Studios and have paintings in collections around the world. I have had paintings selected for the ING Discerning Eye in 2023, National Open Art Competition and the Royal Society of Women artists exhibition at the Mall galleries and have been longlisted for the John Moores painting prize and the RA. I was also awarded a residency in February 2019 at Cill Rialaig in Kerry on the West coast of Ireland. Ponds have recently become my focus. The sheer abundance of life has ignited an enthusiasm for mark making and greater experiment. I find myself using collage, painting up pieces of Japanese rice paper in a myriad of colours and adding them into my work as abstract shapes or more recognisable butterflies or fish. Having worked in oils throughout most of my painting life I am now working with a lot of mixed media including collage and acrylic paint. I often include gold /silver or copper leaf in my work weaving it in and out of the layers of paint, using it to give another layer to the surface. I have gone from the vast vista of sky sea and air to the much more intimate world of plants and pools. It is wonderful to immerse myself in this tangle of life with its patterns and complexity. For years I have been fascinated by the larger landscape never focussing on the close up but always thinking about what makes the whole. I feel a need to look closer now; using ponds to explore the painted surface through a lense which is pointed at the more intimate corners of life. I love to start from chaos and create a balance and harmony drawn from the greater landscape and now captured by its more intimate parts. I paint , based on 'things seen': formerly still life, now mostly landscape, in which I aim to evoke time and place, using colour and light. I paint in thin layers, laying paint over paint to exploit its transparency, a technique of which Turner and Titian were both masters. My formative influences included Georgio Morandi, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still. Morandi is remembered for pointing out that "There is nothing more abstract than the visible world". I in my own way set out to make abstract compositions out of things I have seen, and been moved by: "A world observed and translated ".