Having worked in the southwest as artist and art teacher for over thirty years, I explore a range of media and styles, including sculpture, linoprinting and Life Drawing; but find I keep returning to my oil paints and the seascapes around my home.
Living on the coast, I am constantly buoyed by the colours and movement of the ocean.
I’m interested in the colours that flicker and shimmer at the edge of the ocean, and the calligraphic marks that people and debris make on the beach.
When I paint en plein air seascapes I try to get as high a viewpoint as possible so I can see down into the water. Sometimes I stretch my perspective on the water even further - tilting the picture plane as if I'm very much higher than I really am. Some of these paintings take that a step further by imagining a bird's eye view and how people enjoying the water's edge might look from above.
Often I paint a place or a moment in a straightforward realistic way, and then it may lead on to a looser or playful series of imaginative paintings.
With ocean water constantly moving, our eyes struggle to focus; we can’t pin down a still moment, a still image. In pursuit of this evanescence, my original vision dances away, abstracted in calligraphic marks and colour contrasts and obscured by successive layers of paint.
In trying to strike a balance between the abstract and the real, I find my work swings back and forth between the two.