I am a contemporary British painter based in North Oxfordshire in England. I trained at Hull School of Art graduating with a BA in Fine Art in 2001. I received a traditional 1990s art school education by which I mean that if I wanted a tutorial, I had to look for my tutors in the pub. What art school gifted me was the opportunity to work in close contact with fellow artists and to bounce my ideas off them. Most of my technical ability has been magpie’d from books and workshops and teaching has been my way of keeping in contact with other creative people.

When I was young painting was all I wanted to do and it is still the thing I go to bed dreaming about and the activity around which I plan my day. I spent many years working for an arts charity putting together a curriculum of adult learning workshops and classes, and it was during this time that I also trained as a teacher. As a consequence, I have now been running my own painting and drawing sessions for nearly twenty years.

My paintings are concerned with the way the past intrudes upon the present. Symbols, signs, animal tracks, and claw marks mix with telegraph poles, gates, and fenceposts as we search for ways to remember who we once were by seeking out the wild face of our surroundings.

I keep sketchbooks that serve as phrasebooks and personal dictionaries; marks and colours that resonate help to develop a personal dialect in paint. I record my surroundings, including field lines, hedgerows, and patterns of perspective. I begin with one these sketches in mind, along with a primed wooden panel and some charcoal. I use intuitive marks to focus more on the sense of a place rather than the reality, which is often very muddy!

I am a seeker of quiet liminal spaces, the kind that feel awash with the unseen energies of the past. Over the last couple of tumultuous years, many of us have felt called towards the outdoors and its seeming neutrality in the face of global catastrophe. The wildflowers still bloomed, the trees still greened and shed their leaves and the rain and sun still showered and shone. Though we may not be permanent, either individually or collectively, there is solace to be found in the reliable cycles of the natural world and perhaps one of the legacies of this time will be a move towards a more natural and sustainable way of life, not just in the environmental sense but also by abandoning the cycle of busyness and burn out that keeps us estranged from the feel of the earth beneath our feet. These paintings have emerged from this time not just as a reflection of the number of days I spent outside just noticing things, but as a testament to the way I want to live in the future. Slower, lighter, and more useful. Not as a consumer but as a maker of things; objects and paintings that recall the rituals and rhythms of a time before smart phones and the 24-hour news cycle.

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