Turning Point Print

I read German & Philosophy at Oxford in the days when you could still get away with that sort of thing, before moving to a remote cottage in North Cornwall. I worked for Britain’s largest conservation charity, The National Trust, for a number of years on real pick & shovel projects – in some of Cornwall’s most beautiful coastal & woodland areas, and in all weathers - until deciding to devote myself full-time to painting & writing. Since 2011 (my first year of exhibiting in the US), I’ve had works in numerous shows & galleries, and been awarded prizes at regional and national juried exhibitions. I’ve also won prizes for poetry. I now divide my time between Cornwall, New York City & East Hampton, NY. My father was a signwriter, and I grew up with the smell of paint & turpentine; I have early memories of climbing ladders & scaffolding to help him with rooftop signs or the hand-painted graphics on heavy goods vehicles – Health & Safety would have been horrified. Santa invariably gave me a shiny new enamel box of watercolours every Christmas; several of them are still around, if somewhat the worse for wear – but none of the early coloured pencils has survived. It was probably inevitable I’d end up as a painter. To a philosophy student, becoming an artist seems a relatively pragmatic career move, and the preparation is as good as any other… I’ve always loved the alchemy of line & colour, and hunting for the spark that makes all the difference to an image. Whatever the initial idea, a picture shouldn’t turn out exactly as originally conceived: I’m not in control of the process, nor would I want to be – it’s the journey that’s interesting, and discoveries made along the way. I will change my technique or the colours on my palette if it starts to feel too familiar & comfortable: the materials & subject have a say in what becomes of them, and painting is always a form of negotiation or collaboration between us. I hope I never get clever enough to know the formula. ‘Bug Screen’ is a case in point: I wanted to evoke the special sense of being indoors on a hot summer’s afternoon, and was intending to enclose the scene with a window frame; I chose the screen instead for its distancing, atmospheric & perspective-enhancing properties, and because it intensified the effect of bright light.