The Hill That Works: Pentes de la Croix Rousse Print

Naked, the landscape speaks of and for itself. Through exploring the underlying frenetic activity, complex movement and changes that have inhabited a landscape, I explore its evolution and transformations as a living entity and witness to human activity. Although they rarely include the human figure I consider landscapes to be human in their formation and sensuality. The human figure itself has similar qualities; tension and movement; order and rules, including and revealing contrasts and idiosyncrasies. Likewise, the portrait. In my industrial drawings and paintings, I like to explore the complex functions and pattern-forms of heavy apparatus and machinery. I find myself fascinated by the contradictory qualities, from abrupt shifts between the bold immensity of furnaces, cooling towers and refineries to the fine, well-defined lines of diagrams. The gigantic and the minute share a structural fluidity that informs my practice. The finished work is an exploration of process and change as basic materials, paint, charcoal, pastels – including the subject matter itself – is transmuted through a responsive working and reworking of theme, figure and movement. Changes are both fundamental and amplifying and very often take on a life of their own. The resulting artwork is a heretical broth of lines, dynamism and emotion. I find I respond to the same dynamic in grand vistas of architecture as well as in the aerial views of cities; in a face or in a life model.