A life time ago I was an assistant painter, at Drury Lane theatre in Covent Garden. Learning the art of creating backcloths and scenery for theatre, opera and ballet. For the following 15 years I painted every day, I absorbed and learned from the best in the industry how to produce large scale artwork that directly transport the viewer and support the intention of the performance. But for all those years, while I learned and breathed the art of painting, I painted what I was told. I made art which was someone else’s vision.
Like many, my epiphany came with parenthood. I looked at my tiny small daughter and asked myself what do I want most for her. Bravery, authenticity, creativity. Perhaps it was time for walking the walk. For the first time asking myself what would I paint If I had no brief to fulfill.
What would I make if I was truly brave. For the last ten years I’ve been trying to answer that question. Each painting I’ve made over this period has inched me fractionally closer to my real self.
Looking to nature for Inspiration feels obvious. I find myself drawn to the world we inhabit beyond man’s intervention. The things that came before and will remain afterwards. The wisdom you can feel in an ancient forest. The pure energy that palpates from a crashing wave.
The exploration of my small place in this enormous sphere. My work begins with sketchbook scratches, made kneeling in forests and in the edges of cliffs. Then my challenge begins, so how do you take a little doodle on paper and turn it into a full-size canvas? Because that felt like the next step. To create paintings which retained the quickness and gestural quality of the sketches, the truth and sense of place, but worked at a scale which I find exciting. A scale that says, step right into this painting, break the fourth wall, follow the path. I wanted to make illustrations using the qualities of old-fashioned ink, charcoal and line, painterly like a backcloth, but by their very scale subvert and challenge expectations.