Landscape
My most recent work has been of the landscape and especially the beaches, where I live. My home, on the Sussex coast, sits in an archetypal English coastal landscape of white chalk cliffs, pebble beach and rolling downs.
My approach to this familiar environment is fresh and dynamic. The beach is a landscape in a constant state of flux and it is in this terrain that I create paintings in oil and watercolour, that are micro landscapes from the rocks, pools, weed and chalk I find.
My work explores the shifting relationships of the place where land meets sea. The work explores the rhythms of the landscape, the relationships between planes and shapes of boulders, perhaps as they tumble down the beach (‘Rock fall’ 2005), or emerge from the sea after the tide recedes (‘Birling Gap’ 2006). Other works abound with an unearthly atmosphere. In ‘Lemon shaped rock’, 2006, the image draws the focus to one monolithic boulder which sits like a battered UFO amid shallow pools on the chalk bedrock. In the image I use lurid greens in the fore ground and dark earthy browns in the background to create a mood that is shadowy and brooding.
In other paintings, I have used the same bright greens of seaweed alongside the creamy white of chalk, to give the paintings a soft luminous vibrancy. ‘Beach’ 2006 captures the glowing stillness of chalk boulders, softened into rounded shapes by the sea and spread before the viewer like an iridescent lunar landscape.