My recent paintings re-imagine ideas of landscapes, a subject in painting which, for me seems important right now. These paintings also contemplate bodily forms, patterns of energy and industry, layered materiality and shifting terrains. The idea of the ‘Weltlandschaft’ is important to the structures in the paintings, as the viewpoint is often bird-like, encompassing both height and distance, stretches of space and time, a landscape that points between something done here and forgotten there. Scale is important too, epic themes can collide with the trivial or commonplace but what is always implicated is how human activities impact on and interact with the landscape. My sources are drawn from memories, maps, art histories, cartoons and government information films. I draw from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Looney Tunes, from Breughel and Rubens to Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier’.
The making of the paintings are intuitive, each set of found concerns is worked out in the studio with a process of trial and error. There is as much obliteration and erasure in the development of the paintings as construction. Improvisation is important as structures are tested as much as composed and complex surfaces are reworked. For me, these landscapes suggest the instability of experienced events, an instability which seems to point to the future.