A memory of the rivers, streams and hidden waterways I explored and played in as a child prompted this work.
My youthfull playgound was the woodland, fields, streams, and seasonal ponds around my home on the edge of Malvern and the atmosphere, lush beauty, fragrence and flickering light of those adventures are often at the heart of my artworks. While not an exact specific place or time I wanted this work to evoke the feeling of exploration through a British waterway and the intrigue of what might lay just beyond the bend in the river.
My work aims to sit somewhere between the intense emotion of Samuel Palmer landscapes and the optical intensity of early work of Kandinski. Contemporary influences are Wolf Khan and Brian Rutenberg.
My method is abstraction inspired by the UK landscape which is not the 'soft, safe, pretty' subject as dismissed by some contemporary critics. It is a powerful and gutsy, intense, passionate, and often sublime gateway to meditation and understanding.
River Bend in progress in the studio
