People mostly become artists because their most profound aesthetic sensations have come from art works and they want to participate in the dialogue.
In a world of proliferating and dazzling visual media, I increasingly value painting for its silence, its static quality, its refusal to explain.
Since moving to South Somerset in 2007 my work has inevitably become more concerned with the experience of landscape and the seasons. I use the word ‘experience’ deliberately: I do not pretend to paint landscape directly so much as impression, recollection and a personal mythology of places. This has also increasingly led me to work in groups or sets of paintings rather than towards a single idealised image. I have come to accept that one cannot always be equally happy with all parts of a work: some bits will be dark or incoherent, but that is true both of the landscape and life in general.
