My lifelong journey in art has followed my travels around the UK and the world. I see many influences from places and people but most of all in my present environment in Exeter, South Devon.

 

My landscape inspired paintings and prints aim to express wildness and movement, colour and vibrancy. There are glimpses of features giving scale and contrast though increasingly I’m omitting these and heading towards a more abstract response.

 

Brought up in the West Midlands I had a childhood rich in people but found the flatness and soullessness of the urban landscape uninspiring. As a child, I fantasied about industrial cloud formations pretending they were mountains, seas, beaches and skies.

 

I studied in Leeds and after teaching moved to Birmingham where I and gained an M.A. at Birmingham school of art

I subsequently taught there for 6 years before moving to Devon where I’ve lived for the last 26 years, a member of the South West Academy as well as the 21 Group of artists.

 

My interest in printmaking led me to experiment with monotypes, the most painterly form of printmaking. I was a member of Dartington Printmakers for many years. A few years ago a painting course with the landscape painter David Tress led me to a more expressive form of printmaking and painting.

 

This also created an enormous transition with the move from oil painting and printmaking to working with acrylics. The properties of acrylic paint had previously deterred me. I preferred the flexibility of working in oils but after a week in Pembrokeshire working from plein air sketches and working in acrylics I moved to a freer, a more expressive approach which then influenced my printmaking

 

I’m also interested in the inner landscape of my imagination.

 

“Energy and motion made visible – memories arrested in space”

― Jackson Pollock

 

The exciting use of colour and design in the pastel work of David Blackburn led me to work which exploited the contrast of rich swathes of colour with delineating blocks of black satisfying both the need for experiment and control.

 

My most recent monotypes have made that journey into near abstraction with the experimentation of reusing previous fragments of monotypes as CHINE COLLE.

Although I strive for abstraction as the most satisfying form of art practice for me I understand and take on board the words of Kandinsky

 

“Form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound.”

― Wassily Kandinsky

 

It’s that inner sound I’m chasing and hope to capture.