I use images of the many places I have visited and lived, Suffolk being recent and current.
The fascination of this landscape of marshes, muddy estuaries and beaches of pebble,
grasses and shingle, provides an endless source of inspiration.
With the right atmospherics, anything and everything can reflect a powerful beauty – from a sunset or a mountain, coastlines, fields and islands, to a moody thunderstorm at sea.
My recent paintings are very much about a sense of place and weather, and painterly
concerns such as texture, colour, shape and surface. I have not attempted accurately to
record or recreate, but to evoke the landscape of the real, remembered and imagined.
While the experiences are autobiographical, the images I make are carefully mediated
memories of the many and varied landscapes through which my life has passed.
These paintings of unpopulated places have an emotional charge. As an artist I choose and
edit the scenes, setting the stage for viewers to bring their imagination and private meaning
to these places, and wanting the painting to evolve its own life and meaning. Different
places in the landscape trigger memories of a shared past: the paintings are also enquiries
into unfamiliar spaces and attempt to create something unpredictable, beyond the subject.