The natural world is my primary inspiration and fascination as an artist. I moved to Southern Gulf Islands in B.C. compelled to paint the particular landscape of the eroded sandstone shoreline. Over the next several years, I traveled the West Coast discovering and painting variations of the sinuous, waveworn stone. In the course of this work, I experimented with materials, point of view, scale and colour to explore the concept and experience of “a sense of place”.
Drawn by the desire to use more color in my work, I began to paint flowers from my garden. In this series, I continued to work in the style I developed for the stones, using many thin layers of paint to create the feeling of light emanating from within the object itself, while choosing an exaggerated scale and close up point of view to create a sense of being inside the flowers themselves.
My experiences of the ocean in Mexico drew me to paint a series of waves.
Recent work:
I am currently working on a series of acrylic paintings of “sea/skycapes”; images drawn from the islands where I live. My primary focus in this work is to explore the particular light, stilling for a moment it’s ephemeral and transitory nature.
Light has symbolic meaning, light is our first and primary experience as well as perhaps our last. Light informs our sense of time and place and we often respond emotionally to a particular light; we have associations with and memories of light in both our waking and dream lives.
My approach to this series is to simplify the composition and to create an interplay between abstraction and figuration, stasis and motion, matter and light.
I use many thin layers of paint, interweaving cool and warm colours, light and dark, transparent and opaque. As I’m interested in painting an ephemeral moment of a particular light, I take photographs and often make small pastels to use as reference material in my studio.
I hope in my paintings to share my experience of the beauty and joy of our stunning natural world.