My art
I have attended painting classes at local adult education colleges but I am mainly a self-taught artist. I have carried out a fairly thorough study of books on water colour and acrylic techniques and on landscape painting.
My aim is to capture the beauty of the real world as I see it. And this can involve me painting subjects which to other eyes might seem mundane or uninteresting, such as scenes of dereliction or woodland vegetation. The effects of light and the interesting textures produced by decay are important to me. ( Ruskin once pointed out that when Turner painted boats they were always in "some aspect of decay or danger".)
I have spent a lot of time out and about looking at the world and taking photographs from an artisitc perspective. I use some of these photographs as the starting point for my paintings.
I had heard a few times over the years that Abstract painting is much more expressive and challenging so I took the opportunity of going to a new class at Swarthmore Education Centre in Leeds led by the artist Alex Higson. We looked at the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s, and tried to copy some of their styles; and then we were encouraged to experiment and develop our own ideas.
I also studied the books of the Dutch artist Rolina Van Vliet; she emphasises the use of the pictorial elements and also a strong understanding of compostion and design.
My favourite abstract artists are perhaps Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter. Purely by accident some of my paintings are very similar to those of Ad Rheinhardt, a member of the New York School of abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s.
In my abstracts I tend to focus a lot on colour combinations, composition and texture.
