Painting, Drawing and Works on Paper

These paintings are imagined landscapes, they are an idea of what the experience of a landscape might represent. They probe at a perceived separation between us and nature, an otherness about the natural world. Instead of the romantic and sublime illusion of traditional landscape painting, these works point to the gap between the landscape and ourselves.

 

In recent years my work has focused on re-imagining landscapes as though looking through a window, an opening or a portal. I’ve been using these rectangular forms as framing devices for the landscape as a way of interrupting the pictorial space and separating the viewer from the image. I like the idea of giving the painting some kind of reflexivity as if it is pointing to its own artifice, this also plays with a broader metaphor of our internal experience of looking out upon an external, separate, physical world.

 

I usually like to invent a scene from my imagination but will occasionally draw upon elements from online, physical photos, magazines and my own household objects . I use patterns or geometric forms to depict interior space and imbue a sense of order, tranquility and domesticity, plants serve to break up the space in the image and as a mediator between the interior and the exterior. The rocks in the images represent nature and the eternal and are there to ground the viewer forming a connection between the interiors and the landscape. The paint is handled in several different ways from gestural and fast to careful and slow and the surfaces move between flat and thin, thick and impasto. These varying techniques are employed to further emphasis the material of the painted image.