Staithes Harbour 025

Product description

I aim to paint my sensations as directly as I can without decorative distortions or exaggerations.  The apparently simple idea is that the direct use of paint and colour can account for a profound visual experience, deepening and developing that experience through the process. We start from a position of necessary naivety and paint towards a form of realisation. The role of abstraction within the process is one of developing the understanding of what is seen, as well as revealing and clarifying the vision via the unique language of painting, but why and how a painting can (hopefully) account so completely for an experience of the world is still a mystery.
 
Above all my paintings are about visual enjoyment and the celebration of beauty, although my goal is certainly never to make a “beautiful painting.” We are apparently the only creatures who experience beauty and that we do so is surely deeply significant and at the core of what makes us human. In a too-often tragic and cynical world the words of the poet R.S. Thomas;  “…you can witness the extent of the spectrum and grow rich with looking,” are, for me, more than just a consolation. Seeing is something we still know so little about.’