Welcome to a website about my painting and drawing. Mostly I paint landscapes in oils, acrylics or watercolours. I love to paint on a large scale (paintings often measure between 60 and 100cms a side), but I sometimes paint larger or smaller work. Work often begins outside, en plein-air, and is then developed in my studio. It may begin as a series of drawings trying out options before I settle on a compostion or I may work directly - an immediate response to where I am.
My landscapes are portraits of places – they’re not about a universal landscape, but the specific view from where I stand or climb: a particular buttress eroded, or a particular tree. It's not just a mountain, it's that mountain seen from this place. I want someone who knows the place to recognise it.
I paint the solidity and wilderness of the mountains and crags where I have climbed, not the view from the valleys, but close-up and personal – straight to the point, tracing the climbing lines, discovering the edges. I’m fascinated by rocks’ structure, revealed in light and shade.
These places seem permanent, but I’m also interested in the slow wash of the sea on the coast, the brook shaping its boulders and the glaciers tearing at the mountain – the beauty of inevitable erosion. I have begun to add signs of human presence affecting the land, standing up stones, bridging water and tiptoeing across rock and up snowy gullies. Deceptively tiny changes with cumulatively huge effects.
