Some thoughts about my practice

My paintings often involve a collision of urban and natural forms... 

In my paintings I try to evoke a state of experience that is some way between immersion and distance. I believe that our experience of the world is a dialogue between our direct encounters and our subsequent imagining and re-imagining of what we encounter. My paintings often start with a single idea, a memory of a place or event that I find significant enough to want to paint  The imaginary is the psychological aspect of images, and in my painting I am concerned with creating imagined landscapes that draw from my experience of real places but also acknowledge my identification with a romantic imaginary, ...

For me the experience of living in the modern urban world is one of contrast between being immersed in the activity of urban life and the distancing that is important for us to gain a sense of clarity and purpose...

I use thin washes of paint that build up in layers and let it drip, splash and generally behave like paint, and thicker paint to define areas of solidarity. The resulting shifting focus between more and less defined areas is suggestive of how we imagine and remember images, with some details leaping out at us and others obscure and indistinct.

A heightened sense of colour is important in my work as it allows me to evoke a dream-like, hallucinatory atmosphere... 

March 2011

New paintings Jan/Feb 2011

All paintings are 170cm by 130cm

Translations show.

Vague description of my dissertation.

The research I have been doing for my dissertation has been concerned with peoples’ experience of the world, how our daily interactions with our environment enables us to form identities and attachments, in order to contain our experiences in a way to make sense of them. I proposed that the desire for movement is an innate desire people have, and that the idea of travel is embedded in our collective imagination.

 My research led me to the idea of imagination as ‘a collective social fact’; an idea suggested in the book Modernity at Large, by Arjun Appadurai . There is a feeling that in the modern world we experience a severed relationship with authenticity, that is to say, the structures and rituals of modern life interfere in some way with true experience. The tourism industry has used this idea to sell holidays to us with the promise of authentic experience. The collective imagination described by Appadurai is a reaction to this feeling, and many complicated factors that leads to the imagination, the image, the imagined, being an integral aspect of our experiences.

The effects of globalisation, the global flow of people, media, technology and information has significantly changed how we see the world...

I have been examining what constitutes truth from a variety of perspectives, the first being the objective approach of tourism, which led me onto exploring how a child experiences the world. Then I wrote about the social/political effects of global culture. Recently I have been writing about the constructed truths in cinema, using Herzog’s Aquirre Wrath of God as an example of an antithesis to the constructed images of mainstream cinema.   

New works in progress...

some older paintings