The Eternal Land. The Quiet Air.
The inspiration for these recent paintings lies within a career-long pre-occupation with landscape. My ‘Romanticist Inner Eye’ provides the motive behind these conceptual landscapes, finding retrospective echoes back to seventeenth century Dutch landscapists. Music and poetry also play their part.
There is no corporeal reality to place or topographical location but purely a prolonged fascination with the constancy of elements such as air, light, wind, water, clouds, soil, sun and moon. Their transient and ephemeral nature provoke visual reactions. Nature is strong and there is no going against it.
So, for me, painting is a process of finding out and comes with trials and errors. Thinking with paint involves intuitive re-working, often it’s a risky process that entails frequently inarticulate reactions, intrinsically non-verbal thought, that leads to a ‘truth’ to be discovered. I feel it not only represents just a way of depicting landscape but also a state of mind, a response, a mood or a feeling. A great deal is done by responding intuitively as in ‘a conversation with paint’.
Beginning with applying pigment alla prima then working in and on from there. In the final analysis, if there is one, the subject and process that ensues, coalesce and accrete into work that, perhaps, suggests, evokes, implies or intimates a response.
