I spent most of my childhood summers in Spain with my family, in a seemingly endless road trip across vast, ochre plains punctuated by gardens of unimaginable beauty. My current work has been an attempt to evoke the feeling of those places and that time, enhanced by my accumulated experiences and layered memories, as I have revisited over the years. Deserts and desert plants remain a fascination.

 

Painting is an interaction between me, memory, landscape and paint. It is not always equal – different elements take turns to dominate. Each painting becomes a kind of reverse excavation, building up and scraping back texture, layering with glazes and scumbles, letting accidents happen, until there is a complex surface that expresses the mystery and energy of the natural world. I like to disrupt the pictorial logic, reflecting the way I perceive things – in fragmented glimpses, not in linear or methodical ways. In this occasionally intense process I am not trying to make a representation, but to allow the viewer to recognise something of their own experience in the image.