Statement

The work is concerned with ‘a felt sense’ of the world and the physical act of painting. Energetic atmospheres collide across the picture plane in various states of expansion, contraction and dispersion. Gestures are both conscious and unconscious; paint-overs, erasures and singular strokes coax a painting into being.

Sensitive, crass, sophisticated, naive, illuminating; this is figuration as a result of abstraction with no defined narrative. It is an invitation for the artist and the viewer to delve; to contemplate a sense of time and place.

This is an attempt at open-ended symbolic communication influenced by exposure to the digital, the range of art history and concern for colour, pattern, texture and the organic shape of the everyday.

An understanding of this work lies in a grasp of the way Abstract Expressionism focuses on the tactile, physical interaction of brush and surface. It is also inspired by Gillian Ayres’ authentic informal work, the cinematic lushness of Peter Doig, Amy Sillman’s play of shape and colour and Andrew Kerr’s handling of layers, atmosphere and abiguity.

It gives voice to the order, spontaneity, control and chaos that’s alive within us. Freud said that a painter’s tastes “must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art” (Lucian Freud).