Abstract Paintings: Inscape
The Inscape series (2015 onwards) developed out of visits to East Anglia, drawing upon memories harking back to childhood - a time living under vast skies, surrounded by the horizon lines of a flat landscape. This series is an exploration of both inner and outer terrain. It explores fictionalised memories and wistful nostalgia to create calm, meditative, abstract landscape paintings, each with a horizon line.
Fen is one of the first of this series and my interpretation of how it feels to be deep in that territory, surrounded by huge ditches either side of every road, black-earth fields beyond, and big, big skies. Green Earth III was also inspired by a visit to the Fens, a flat landscape near to the village where I grew up. This is a place of vast, often empty fields, light shining in the puddles, and huge horizons.
All my family come from East Anglia, including ancestors as far back as I can trace. By the early 1700s, they were all based within a few miles of each other, in the flatlands where the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire meet. They worked on farms and have remained local to this day. This information inspired Ancestral Land as well as several other series of work about land and ancestry.
With Zen Landscape, I was intentionally creating a visual haiku - paring down the view to its bare bones. This painting is Zen in the sense of 'just the essence, this is enough'. Heath was inspired by a field on the South Downs near to where I live, where a small cluster of trees is surrounded by bright, yellow rape crops in the springtime.
Fen is one of the first of this series and my interpretation of how it feels to be deep in that territory, surrounded by huge ditches either side of every road, black-earth fields beyond, and big, big skies. Green Earth III was also inspired by a visit to the Fens, a flat landscape near to the village where I grew up. This is a place of vast, often empty fields, light shining in the puddles, and huge horizons.
All my family come from East Anglia, including ancestors as far back as I can trace. By the early 1700s, they were all based within a few miles of each other, in the flatlands where the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire meet. They worked on farms and have remained local to this day. This information inspired Ancestral Land as well as several other series of work about land and ancestry.
With Zen Landscape, I was intentionally creating a visual haiku - paring down the view to its bare bones. This painting is Zen in the sense of 'just the essence, this is enough'. Heath was inspired by a field on the South Downs near to where I live, where a small cluster of trees is surrounded by bright, yellow rape crops in the springtime.