I have been painting landscape for over 26 years, from my days as a student at Goldsmith’s College in London painting the declining industrial landscape of my home in Newcastle-upon Tyne, to the last nineteen years spent living in and exploring the unique rural landscape of the Outer Hebrides, islands that lie off the north-west coast of Scotland.
Having a month in the artists’ studio in Akureyri has given me the opportunity to look at a different and stunning landscape here in northern Iceland. It always takes me time to look beyond the obvious, and to understand the depth of any landscape, to interpret its subtle moods, and to see the interactions between its different aspects. So I always begin by looking and drawing.
It was always going to be a challenge in the timescale to find and develop finished pieces of work, so I have concentrated on making drawings and studies from field trips around the area. I like to develop new techniques, moving from abstraction to representation through every shade of imagery, at every scale, in my work. The result is a continual construction, destruction, and reconstruction, often using materials such as oil, pigment, watercolour, turpentine, wax, sand, to try and bring the experience of being in a landscape to a surface.
I am intending to show my drawings and some of the early studies that are part of that working process. These range from intimate and rapid studies to finally large developed works. Light and form, my continuing obsession, are the theme running through the work, demonstrating the ongoing struggle to record the subtlety of the instant.
