I was recently interviewed by Boringdon Hall Hotel as they were interested discovering more about the link between nature and my landscape paintings. Last week a beautifully designed magazine arrived, with a six page interview on my work, and process. I’ve transcribed the interview below while adding a couple more images to help the article so why not grab a cuppa and have a read. All the images featured are available as limited edition Giclée prints from my store.
Could you describe who you are, what you did as a career before, and how your work developed to painting?
I’m primarily a landscape painter and charcoal artist although I explore other media including screen printing, etching and giclée digital printing. I studied graphic design in London and I was fortunate the module included art history and cultural studies, life drawing, print techniques (including dry point, etching, litho, screen printing) and encouraged ‘the power of mark making’. I chose graphic design as my vocation, working in the music industry on scores of bands and designing festival identities (apart from art, music is my other great love in life) and I co-founded a design studio. Through all those years I always carried sketch books, filling them with drawings and paintings so my when I started devoting more time to art (from around 2010) it was a natural progression as my happiest creative moments more ‘analogue’ mark making. I liked the way running a design partnership felt a little more autonomous to working for a boss in some company and I push this independence further as an artist.
What drew you to painting countryside landscapes?
It’s the sense that the countryside is an energy that connects us all. Through millennia the land has been worshipped, celebrated and feared. Since my earliest years I’ve been fascinated with folklore, and the myths and legends of this country, this is all channelled into the tactile, interactive experience of working with paint and charcoal. It helps forge inspirational connections with the landscape. I recently watched a program on an modern day engraver who insisted on working with the oldest engraving tools as this inspired him to walk in the footsteps of an older tradition which is what fired him up in his work and it’s exactly that for me, only I’m trying to record land that changes from season to season and year to year. I love tractor trails in a field because it’s the briefest form of human mark making on the land and the land will eventually reclaim and cover those marks until the cycle happens again the next year. To just sit and concentrate on recording this constant change is a meditative process.
Have you experienced artist block with your work? What do you do to get things flowing again?
The nature of creativity involves the acceptance that inspiration and ‘creative blocks’ are entwined and cyclical. Dissatisfaction in any area of our lives ultimately leads to the evolution of new styles or movements which creates the golden inspirational eras. I have found that to be an artist involves interpreting a world through your mind’s eye – and perhaps the “personal reward” comes by making a connection with another person who resonates with your interpretation. Travelling the creative path to that reward can be a mix of equal parts frustration and eureka moments as the work starts, changes course, develops, until suddenly the painting is finished and the time is right to walk away. When I started the journey to becoming a painter the first period of development was hard. I was largely dissatisfied because I felt what I was creating wasn’t what gave me an inner fire - and I hadn’t found what it was that truly fired me as a painter. 2013 was the pivotal moment in my direction as I was on a painting break in Northumberland sitting in a wheat field painting tractor trails which looked so captivating. It started to rain and I had to rely on rapid mark making so I could pack up and avoid the imminent downpour. Suddenly I was staring at something I had recorded that captured a simplistic, elemental side of nature that I loved. From that moment on I haven’t really stopped as I know what motivates me and that’s the feeling of “oneness” with nature. That could be a log fire after a long walk, running for cover from the rain under an ancient Oak, staring at the vastness of the sea or just taking in a full moon and simply ‘connecting’. Lord Byron wrote: “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore… I love not Man the less, but Nature more”. And I keep this vision in my mental “inspiration bank”.
Do you have a favourite place to get away in the South West? Why do you like it?
The Jurassic Coast is the area I love the most in the South West – cliff walking from Burton Bradstock through West Bay, Eype and onwards to Seatown. I particularly love the view over Lyme Bay with Golden Cap on your right because it’s an elemental, almost primal experience, it lifts the soul, and that’s what I love in a Dorset landscape.
Your work is vibrant and full of awe-inspiring nature—yet it has elements of expressionism, too. What inspired you to explore this style?
I’ve always favoured a more visceral ‘impasto’ mark making and used to paint more or less exclusively on hardboard so I could attack the surface, scouring the paint and substrate with sandpaper to roughen to the paint. In the beginning (because of work commitments) I’d only have the opportunity to paint in the summer months which in turn informed the bright colours I’d work with. My first joint exhibition in Alnmouth (Northumberland) a few years back was with a fellow artist who was genuinely surprised to meet me dressed in dark blues and black as she assumed, I’d be as vibrantly clothed as my work! This vivid palette has evolved since then and my painting style became more fluid and less horizon-led. Over lockdown I’ve started combining a more intricate technique, reversing the way I usually work: firstly creating a layered, textured base and then OVER this, creating a more defined painting of trees by way of the sky (which I usually paint first). This more intricate result is an exciting avenue to explore more as the outcome is less expected. I do like to express a feeling in my work and enjoy a certain unpredictable combination of colour so perhaps my work is expressionistic, I hadn’t really thought about it that way before.
Could you describe any artists that have inspired you in the context of nature and creativity?
David Hockney has been a lifelong inspiration and I could list scores of his paintings that inspire me. His more recent ‘My Yorkshire’ work is a genius creating atmosphere, space, emotion with a wonder of the landscape of his youth. My absolute favourite is “Winter Timber” pained in 2009. When I saw it for the first time I was bowled over at the simplicity and how he had captured the warmth of a moment with such a fauvist use of colour. Another artist I’m inspired by is Norman Ackroyd, a predominantly aquatint artist creating intensely atmospheric works recording the very outer reaches of the British Isles in a way I can’t do justice in words. Watch “What Do Artists Do All Day?” on YouTube and it offers an incredible insight into his working process and drive. Richard Diebenkorn, Billy Childish, Ivon Hitchens, Käthe Kollwitz, Franz Klein – the list is always being added to and although there are so many contemporary artists I massively rate, there’s something that these particular artists manage to say that truly resonates.
Do you paint in nature or from photographic references? Do you experience a difference in painting from either of them?
Wherever possible I’ll paint ‘plein air’. If that’s not possible I’ll make sketches and take the memory back to the studio to create the painting. Whenever I have used a photograph as a reference, I haven’t enjoyed the result. It’s because a photograph constrains the artistic interpretation of the landscape. Many is the time a painting just evolves from your imagination. I think it was Howard Hodgkin that would spend months in India sitting in a square memorising colour, and then take this back home to inform his work. A landscape is universal, it doesn’t always have to be a specific place, an interpretation can be equally evocative.
What drives you to create?
Connecting with people. I was interviewed and featured in Kate Humble’s book “Thinking On My Feet” published in 2018. Kate had read an article in an in-flight magazine about my love of walking in Wales and she wanted to know more for her book, as Wales is very important to her. She came to interview me and while we were talking I happened to mention my “Silent Voices” series, which was a project about connections in an unconnected world. It involved me screen printing certain messages on leaves and distributing them wherever I went, dropping about 250 or more leaves. Many of them would fall face down or got wet which destroyed the message (as it was water-based non toxic ink) but that was part of the process as the idea behind this project was about human connection in an increasingly disconnected world: the leaf became the metaphor for our thoughts and the millions of leaves that fall around unnoticed are equal to our individual thoughts and dreams that few people ever get to express to other people. There was no email address and no way of knowing who had made them. So would anyone see a leaf and would it connect with them...
It was a few months after I dropped my final leaves that out of the blue I received an email from ‘Julia’. She contacted me to tell me her mother had recently passed away and one day while she was walking through London Fields in Hackney she took a short cut through a pile of leaves and happened to look down and notice a leaf with some writing on it. She picked it up and read the words “It’s When You’re Frail I Love You Most”. She said it felt like a message from someone keeping a kind eye on her and took the leaf home to keep it by a photo of her parents. She happened to see an image on Instagram and followed the links to my page and contacted me to thank me. I told this story to Kate and it moved her enough to ask if I would design the cover to her book with a ‘Silent Voices’ leaf which as I am told was really well received. I was so annoyed I couldn’t be at her book launch because I was taking part in art fair on the private view night! I’m still occasionally contacted by people who have read her book and tell me about their own stories, so I’m happy the connection worked. And this is why I like to create, to connect with people, and share experiences.
Silent Voices limited edition etchings are available here.
With thanks to Eleanor Tomas.