Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your practice
My practice, using oils on canvas, interprets the natural world, flipping between figurative and abstract motifs, reconstructing and remixing elements of landscape. My agenda, covert yet mildly provocative, is to provide a channel for reconnection with the environment.
What are you currently working on?
A series of diptychs and triptychs, slices of observations of the natural world touched by human interference, both benign and disruptive, in a part-ideological, part-realistic fashion. I'm revisiting some favourite localities, using photos and sketches, re-interpreting the images, experimenting with scale and mixing media.
How do you spend your time when you are at the studios?
Preparing canvases - making them up and priming them - often with my go-to starting point for landscape - the red ground.
Looking at my bank of photos and found images. Sketching out ideas. Preparatory drawings.
Drinking coffee.
Making paintings! Getting the marks down.
Unmaking paintings -with the turps rag - taking the marks off - well some of them ... sounds unproductive but this is fine - the ghost images left behind form the next stage of my work.
Talking to other artists about work, stuff, life ....
Cleaning brushes ...
How long have you been a resident At Magdalen Road Studios?
14 months, seems like no time.
What can we expect to see in your exhibition of work at the end of the month?
A mini-retrospective. I'll be putting up some pieces I made earlier last year which I haven't looked at for a while, alongside some recent stuff, to examine the progress, if any ... I may make changes to the earlier work. Assessing which work to take to fairs, etc.
What are you hoping to achieve over the next year?
Experimentation with new media. Development of my technique to enable a re-interpretation of the notion of landscape; working with new subject matter from different localities. Putting some ideas together for a potential collaborative project.