Ancestral Trails, close up detail
My paintings are concerned with the way the past intrudes upon the present and vice versa. Symbols, signs, animal tracks, and claw marks mix with telegraph poles, gates, and fenceposts as we search for ways to remember who we once were by seeking out the wild face of our surroundings.
I keep sketchbooks that serve as phrasebooks and personal dictionaries; marks and colours that resonate help to develop a personal dialect in paint. I record my surroundings, including field lines, hedgerows, and patterns of perspective. I begin with one of these sketches in mind, along with a primed wooden panel and some charcoal. I use intuitive marks to focus more on the sense of a place rather than the reality, which is often very muddy!
I am a seeker of quiet liminal spaces, the kind that feel awash with the unseen energies of the past. 2020 has turned out to be a year where many of us have felt called towards the outdoors and its seeming neutrality in the face of global catastrophe. The wildflowers still bloomed, the trees still greened and shed their leaves and the rain and sun still showered and shone. Though we may not be permanent, either individually or collectively, there is solace to be found in the reliable cycles of the natural world and perhaps one of the legacies of this year will be a move towards a more natural and sustainable way of life, not just in the environmental sense but also by abandoning the cycle of busyness and burn out that keeps us estranged from the feel of the earth beneath our feet. These paintings have emerged from this brutal year not just as a reflection of the amount of time I spent outside just noticing things, but as a testament to the way I want to live in the future. Slower, lighter, and more useful. Not as a consumer but as a maker of things; objects and paintings that recall the rituals and rhythms of a time before smart phones and the 24-hour news cycle.
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