Both Friday Morning and Friday Afternoon are part of a recent and continuing series of paintings, in which the mountain landscape is a vehicle for making an expressive, layered, textural painting. They’re both based on photos I took during a short trek in the French Pyrenees a few years ago with friends. I wanted to capture the vastness and epic quality of the mountain landscape, the earthy pigments on the slopes and the contrasting lighter tones in the snow, clouds and sky.
The figure set against and within this landscape seems quite vulnerable and fragile but I wanted to suggest a sense of connection and harmony when one is in nature, and out facing the elements.
I’m interested in the notion of the journey one goes on when trekking, or going on any long walk, and what ultimately it is that one is trying to achieve. For me, the journey is the point, just like the process and the material is really the subject of the painting. And in these paintings, I want to express the experience of the journey and the experience of making the painting. I hope that the viewer can feel the vitality of the brushwork and mark-making.
In Ghosts and in Communion, similarly, the subject is as much the material and substance of the paint and the process of its making as the object depicted. Both are attempts at evoking an atmosphere from a recognisable scene, in the first, a seascape where the figures are almost collapsing and dissolving into the sea – I’m very interested in the tension between abstract and figurative languages and at what point an image becomes indecipherable and we impose new interpretations on it. It suggests, for me, memory’s slipperiness and ambiguity. I don’t intend any one definitive meaning to be inferred for these paintings.
 The pub interior suggested in Communion is full of darks and midtones, earthy colours, which attracted me purely from  an aesthetic and visual perspective. Again, the activity depicted – someone having a pint – is quite mundane but I’m interested and excited by the way the paint imbues a subject with deeper evocative meaning.Â
