“A constant for nearly 30 years has been observational drawing in small sketchbooks. Looking at a drawing I have made takes me to the moment in that place far more powerfully than looking at a photograph. I enjoy watercolour landscape. I love the medium – its fluency, its directness and its stubbornness. In the studio, painting is a way of being ‘in the moment’”.
The ‘Difficulty of Landscape’ series includes visual disruptions; brush marks and colours creating composites of fleeting moments. They are about painting as much as place; about the qualities of mark making, light and composition as much as depicting land and sky. They are about the process of looking, of finding a ‘view’, but also, glimpsing the landscape through a train or car window, or the changing clouds beyond the horizon. There is a tension between the traditional ‘sublime’ and a modern-day sense of transformation of landscape through human activity.