Statement
I was born in London, but my childhood on the Isle of Wight inspired me to work from the elemental landscape and world around me as a free ,direct and natural way of learning and enquiry - I grew up influenced by the painter David Bomberg and his sense of approaching nature through drawing as a tool to establish a poetry of 'form' as an interconnected reality.
For a while now I have been questioning the limits of being a studio based painter working in a city becoming aware of the nature of my feelings and thoughts in relation to this and how concepts and abstractions begin to shape my larger canvases.
Questioning perhaps how a relationship to Nature can survive and in what ways I struggle at times to realise that understanding - how to harness the elementals of form within a painting working within these constraints.
I had no preconceived ideas about the opportunity I had to work in Portugal in 2009 other than to work with what felt right to me at the time - the sensations of a new landscape that I was aware had some [part] ancestral remnants 'of a sense of place' was all that I had brought with me and the desire to begin working from the world around me - an open doorway in its simplicity that for a few weeks I could sit in a meadow and draw again as a complete source, timeless in nature and unhindered by the endless theories I had accumulated over many years associated with the endless concepts and abstractions built up from ideas of modernism. An escape into a poetics had held together the freedom I knew that painting had always held for me ever since I was a child - and which generated the energy I had also needed to continually be rediscovering as an artist.
These realisations in themselves have been totally liberating and revealing and I am continuing to work with these thoughts.
2011 Shortlisted for EAJU grant [to exhibit work at Casa Guerra Junqueira, Porto ,Portugal]
2010 Oppenhiem John Downes Trust Award, London.
2009 Artist Residency, Mertola, Alentejo, Portugal
2008 Oppenheim John Downes Trust Award, London
2006 Oppenheim John Downes Trust Award, London