Paintings

Painting features strongly in my art practice. I love the textures and colour combinations that I get with using oils in particular: putting paint on, scratching it off…

I also like working in encaustic and with acylic and watercolours.

Some of the paintings here have been made as part of other projects so are included in two areas.

Ships in the Desert

A 12 panel panorama of boats marooned on the Aral Sea Basin. These are oil on canvas using brush and pallet knife. I wanted to convey the feeling of relative emptiness of being in this vast space of desert and sky punctuated by rusting hulking ships.

See more about these paintings

Blue Paintings

Blue has featured strongly in my work over the years. In the oil paintings it was Prussian Blue in particular, as well as Cobalt and French Ultramarine. The intensity of some blues, of being so dark and yet never black. Never black.

In ‘Below 1’ I worked with a pallet knife to create layers that at times were overlaid and at times scraped back to reveal the colours underneath. It’s an abstracted landscape evoking the land as viewed from above. As from a plane or a birds perspective. The additional regularity of some of the shapes – masked out or masked in with masking tape, intended to give that juxtaposition of the ordered alongside the disordered, the rigid with the fluid, the ‘human-made’ against the ‘non-human made’.

Nowhere in particular and many places in general.

I worked with blue a lot in the 90s and early 2000s. It was the colour of sea, the sky, the land at night. It was a colour to get lost in, a colour that took me into places of ‘the other’, the non-me.

The interest in blue also came from using UV sensitive paints to create abstract images that were displayed both in regular lighting and in UV lighting. This ‘blue’ light that we don’t see directly but we see the effects of through the ‘glow’.

Below is a sample of those early paintings.