(written in connection with an exhibition at the Mariner's Gallery, St. Ives in April 2006)
Through painting I aim to celebrate encounters with the visual world. My approach is to channel this sense of celebration through interactions of shape and colour, the substance of paint and the rhythm of brush marks.
I was fortunate to spend two years in Italy in my early twenties. During this time it was the early Rennaissance art of Tuscany and Venice that most impressed me. This confirmed the key role of design in my approach to painting as well as my sensuous enjoyment of colour. I suspect that the latter originally stemmed from a childhood in the tropics when my family lived in Africa. CORNWALL has brought these personal tastes of mine together through its landscape, culture and over-arching quality of maritime light that to my eye so often present fascinating material.
So, VISION in the title of this show is my response to aspects of this environment. In nearly every case I feel compelled to translate it in terms of colour. This in turn involves selecting and adjusting shapes, often tracking down certain kinds of shapes in the landscape such as the fall of a hillside, the curve of a beach or a square of sky. Sometimes I do this with a particular canvas shape in mind, at other times an unexpected discovery can lead to a surprise decision to embark on a new kind of design for a picture, as happened with the explosive shapes of the Lafrowda procession, for example. SHAPING as used in my show's title can also mean the choices I make about the scale and complexity or otherwise of the shapes that I'm going to use to construct a picture in order to convey what I feel about the particular time and place or about an event that appeals to me.
Matisse said some lovely things about painting like: "When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe." *
This resonated strongly with me, especially with the way that having practised as an (S.G.I.) Buddhist for most of my adult life (see www.sgi-uk.org ) informs my approach to painting. It involves seeing one's life state reflected back by one's surroundings.
These are all reasons why I've called this exhibition SHAPING a VISION of CORNWALL.