A Walk through Paint

My paintings are often inspired by walks in nature. I love landscape-painters, but I'm not one of them. For me it's more the experience, the shapes, the colours, the light...I'd love for my work to give you that same kind of feeling you get from going for a walk in the woods, or through an open field, or barefoot by the sea. So, I'm not trying to achieve anything "conceptual". I think we do enough thinking as it is. The last thing I want is for someone to look at my work and go off on a long internal monologue. No! I want my audience to feel something, something good. And if, at times, that makes my work susceptible to a kind of that-would-look-lovely-above-the-couch-because-it-has-that-exact-shade-of-beige...then that's ok. I'll take that in my (mud-covered) stride...! Summer, 115 x 75cm, acrylics on on canvas, July 2011

Where did the saxophone come from?

This work started more than a year ago, and then stood there, silently. Hanging out as it were. It was only recently that I was able to finish it. Seems it needed a saxophone...no idea where that came from! But then, painting is like that most of the time: I have no idea where it comes from. I'm just glad when it arrives! (Although, now that I think about it, the place of no idea does seem to be where it comes from, but since I'm not thinking, I loose track, which, evidently, seems to be how saxophones can get through) saxophone, 115 x 75 cm, acrylics on canvas, july 2011

Prophetic Paint

Sometimes, a prophetic work like this will spontaneously develop. It is as if my higher-self is whispering: "get ready, something is about to show up in your life". A few days after I made this work, I ended up, through a synchronistic series of events, in a woman-I'd-just-met's home, listening to silent music and having my arms gently pulled (I'm not kidding, it's one of the latest healing modalities). Turns out I'd had a "vanishing twin" whilst I was still a tiny embryo. In my mother's womb, before the end of the second trimester, I'd had a twin brother. Can you see the dead fish in the centre of the painting? And I think, over on the right, that's me, swimming on... "birth process, 5 canvases of 40 x 50 cm, acrylics, July 2011"