Artist's Statement
“When reason sleeps, the image awakes.”
This quotation, from Victor Passmore, the 20th Century British artist, hints at the magic in the creative act: if you are lucky, a stint of painting allows you to entirely forget the cares of normal life in devotion to the act of creative achievement.
For me, this is the core excitement and fulfilment of being an artist. My current work centres on the challenge of Abstraction: paring down a landscape, or other objects, to essentials and then trying to make them come alive in a completely different dimension.
For the last two years I have been engaged in this process, making abstract paintings derived from trees in the west Surrey landscape. My latest work is a triptych, measuring 6ft across and 4ft deep. It is painted in monochrome on three specially designed, gently curved canvases. Thick and thin, dark and light, upright and slanted “stripes” fade to a glazed white space in the middle canvas. Smaller works (17” x 21” framed) take this minimalism a step further.
Biography: a busy career as a journalist on the Financial Times allowed little time for painting but having left the company I have been able to take a Fine Art Degree to further my interest in painting.