I have always worked from what is around me, but without clear distinction between the actual, the recollected and the imagined. As my earliest memories are of a lawn, with a rookery in the high trees beyond, and while a student I had the park and Capability Brown landscape of Corsham Court as a playground, it is perhaps not surprising that when the opportunity to live in a house with a high-walled garden and a colony of jackdaws arose I seized it. So my current studio is part of a former coach-house with a door opening onto the garden, and the house beyond.
An interest in multiple images and repetitions goes back to student days, and I am still learning about the possibilities. I have always found the most common, the triptych form, difficult, with an inherent hierarchy. I am more interested in pairs of images that comment one on the other, or sets which hold together in fragile equilibrium, but also contain the possibility of infinite extension. But there are also single canvases, and these seem to focus more on imagined relationships in the landscape, a sort of “what if …”, where things observed in the landscape behave as if they have meaning and purpose beyond their real nature.
Most of the images here are transitional, some literally, begun in London and finished in Somerset (Rewriting History) or recording travel between the two (Journey). Equally there are recollections of the Sussex coast, which I miss but still manage to visit for a few days each month. I am beginning to think about buildings again, although my last pictures in London took a fairly dystopian view of the cityscape. But the landscape I inhabit bears the mark of millennia of human shaping too.