Artist Statement

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The starting point is colour – mixing one that ‘feels right’ for the moment.  Then I follow my nose in a process of visual organisation, adding and taking away, slowly building the possibilities of a sense of place or mood.  I don’t work from drawings and I don’t start with an idea of what the painting will be.  The idea forms as I work in relation to my catalogue of preoccupations, my inner monologue and previous paintings.   

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I like writing and I’m interested in how the verbal and the visual act on each other: words, poetry, lyrics, text messages, the complexity of language, its  acquisition and the construction of complex ideas using only a few words.  The relationship between verbal and visual language and how this relationship impacts on meaning in a painting is something I think about when I’m painting.  The title of a painting is almost never simply a label but rather an active component of the painting itself.



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