I create carefully constructed layered surfaces in oil paint on panel and paper. They are made by gradually applying and removing paint repeatedly over a long period of time.
I draw on personal experiences of real places in order to raise questions about our perceptions of landscape, and the changing relationships between man-made and the natural worlds. They aim to explore the relationships, boundaries and edges between constructed and natural worlds by focusing on experiences lifted from specific locations where this tension is present e.g. A hide for shooting birds, a 2nd world war observation post in the woods, or a series of street lights beside a road.
Drawings, derived from a combination of photographs, memory and invention, are embedded within the surface, and fragmentary painted elements appear to float and overlap against the painted ground.
This working method is intended to echo something of the psychological process involved in the recollection of specific places. They create a sense of depth which draws the viewer into an imagined space. References are made to the tradition of landscape painting, while the use of monochrome colour simultaneously and subtly contradicts this tradition.
The creation of the paintings echoes the way that landscape is constructed, recognising the humanising framework implicit in the act of viewing (and subsequently remembering) a place. "Landscape" is only real as a fiction, filtered by perception, and framed by multifarious inherited visions and traditions of invented landscape.
They are internal landscapes of the mind, which draw on the outside world.
The title of the show is taken from a gardening book - a diagram that shows a cross-section of a water feature. I was attracted by this idea, because of the contrast between the technical "cross-section" and the wildness of the idea of "cascade". The recreation of a sublime waterfall in a garden relates to attitudes and ideas traceable to landscape painting of the 17th and 18th c.
The large red tree painting "Hide 3" is part of a series in response to a triangular steel hide for shooting birds in a wood in the Scottish Borders. The hide itself looks completely at odds with the wood - very much like a Richard Serra sculpture: severe, with a utilitarian minimalist non-aesthetic appeal. It encapsulated perfectly several things I find interesting about "landscape", and the relationship we have with it. The Hide is a functional structure in a planted and managed wood, designed specifically for killing birds for sport. The grouse themselves are kept and fed, protected from wild animals by a fenced enclosure. The triangular shapes lend themselves to abstraction; I layered several drawings of it from different angles, linear marks juxtaposed with traditional romantic elements of landscape: 19th century romanticism spliced with mid-20th century modernism. They are intended to be beautiful, but also slightly deceptive, in that your initial expectation of "landscape" is countered by the diagrammatic elements.
"Enclosure" refers in part to the stark fenced-off enclosures occasionally encountered in the kind of managed woodlands mentioned above, but they are also intended to be suggestive, and open to individual interpretations.
I use trees for several reasons. I grew up in a small village in NE Scotland, and woodland played a large part in my childhood. My father is a cabinet-maker, and his father ran a wood mill.
I am also interested in the way landscape painting has used trees historically, in the classical and romantic traditions, and how this translates into "real" landscapes. Trees are used in reality to conceal, to render something picturesque, for leisure...
They can stand for our relationship with nature, and are often used as a symbol. We control and use them, manage them. They give us oxygen. We do not want to lose them. The history of humanity is linked to the history of woodland - they mean something to us, symbolically and spiritually. We feel an emotional connection with them.
I like the contrast between the forms of the manmade, and the organic forms of the trees. In one important sense my paintings of trees are not trees at all - they are abstractions, simplifications, marks and lines.
The surface is important, and I spend a long time achieving a satisfying, delicate, suggestive, layered surface. Within, or under, this surface can be many lost marks, actually entire lost paintings, which are sometimes faintly and subtly visible.
They are like fields of colour that unify the picture plane, and refer to 20th c abstract painting, the clean edges of modernism countered by a deeply romantic surface.
From an early age (13/14) I have been interested in depicting the landscape. In art school my main concern was still with the land, moving then to hard-edged minimal abstraction, but always with an interest in surface and land - urban landscape.
My new work deliberately references art from the past. In this show I have been examining Breugel, Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer (beautiful painter of 16th c. credited with early independent landscape in 1520 ish) and Claude. There are some direct references to these artists in some of the work, for example Artificial Paradise 4 is based in part on a painting by Claude. Cliff Landscape With Wanderer is a drawing on panel in silverpoint, based on a drawing by Durer.
My process usually begins with an experience of a place, something glimpsed, somewhere visited, which triggers an idea. I don't sketch from life, but instead make written notes. Sometimes I will take photographs, which I may manipulate on Photoshop.
I begin the painting by covering the whole area in one thick layer of paint, either light or dark, using vertical strokes. I then draw into the paint while still wet, and leave this to dry. When dry, I cover the whole again with a contrasting colour/tone, and then wipe it off with a rag.
I repeat this many times, until the drawing is barely visible.
Sometimes the paintings are almost finished, but need something else, so I cover them over and lose them, changing and developing in their own particular ways. They are never predictable, and a piece can change completely, but still with traces of the underlying process. Like a visible history, a time-altered surface.
I am searching for ways to unify form and content.