Thinking About Practice

Ripe Corn Before the Storm

Recently I was required to write an Artist Statement and Biography. This was a difficult task as writing requires a different part of my brain from painting. Nevertheless it was an opportunity to consider what my work is really about, who it is for, what inspires it and whether there is any point to it.

Although all my work begins 'in the field' with observation, 'painting what I see', I realise that it quickly becomes, 'how what I see makes me feel'. How trees and hills and furrow sit together in the language of light and dark. I am interested in the significance of place. This might be somewhere well known such as Ripon Cathedral or the White Horse or a random field or view in which the way things are placed in the landscape makes it out of the ordinary.

As an Art student at York College I specialised in sculpture and I think this looking for shapes, their juxtaposition and contrast, is apparent in my paintings. All paintings begin with observation of what I see and most are painted out in the field- en plein air, but at a certain point the painting takes over and I become interested in pattern, mark making, colour and texture as vehicles of expanding what I see. The work becomes intuitive. In this way, 'my work becomes a hybrid between the observed and imagined, the seen and felt.'

I seek to record a moment in time. A landscape that will change not only with the seasons but with the passing years.