Portfolio

My painting style has developed and grown over the decades, now finding an approach that offers me the freedom to produce works that are gestural and abstract yet evocative of my chosen subject. My currently subject is landscape (this is environmental and could easily include figure, object, and interior), it seems important for me to have external references to find my way into a painting. Yet the subject is often a stage on which the painting itself can be acted out. Painting references often come from walks, passage through an environment and my engagement with it, the painting is then acted out as another walk, a moving adventure on the surface that exists in its own moments in time and space where I can explore my ideas about subject and painting.

I took the Turps correspondence course over the last year as I felt I had found a direction for my work, a way of moving forward but didn’t quite know how to progress, over the last year of engagement on the Turps program I have pushed and tested my processes explored pallet, form, and relationship between works and my studies/reference material. I feel ready to move again to develop my work much further. Through MA study I hope to strengthen the evidence of the ideas in my work, to distil the content and explore more clearly my ideas around visual memory, space, seasonality, and time.

Visual memory - is a fascinating area which I would not only like to develop in my studio work but as an area of research. I explored visual memory in meditation for a paper as part of a meditation teacher training, I took in 2022 and have since been fascinated at how this translates to painting, the making of and the viewing.

Space - this encompasses all the things we know about painting and space in the traditional sense of constructing paintings (and all I know from working in 3D digital space for decades). I am particularly interested in where we position ourselves within, and how we move through an environment or a painting, where the eye goes and what happens to scale under the shifts of our focus and attention, also what happens when we move focus to the peripheral and the incidental.

Seasonality and Time - linked to mood and emotion an enquiry and exploration of our own passage through time, our seasons of youth, middle and old age, and the passage of time through an environment and a painting. Part of my prosses is to allow works time to breathe, adding to them after months or years, often picking up work seasonally.

Although I have listed these elements separately here for clarification, I don’t see them as separate, and they are all intrinsic to my work.