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RWA magazine Autumn 2012
‘I am no longer with a gallery and I don’t do commissions; I do what I want. We have a policy of zero publicity. So those who come are people who want to find me and that’s a good position for me to be in. There are enough people wanting to collect my work. When I was showing at Portal and other galleries I never met my buyers; it was as if I was creating paintings and then throwing them into a black hole. The painting you see on my studio wall is of a girl holding an apple and is called Constant Bower, which may seem a strange title. But if you walk almost anywhere in England, though most of what you see is man-made, you can find little pools surrounded by trees that would have been there a thousand, two thousand years ago. So this little bower is constant, and she goes there to dream. The interesting thing about dreams is that if you observe a child or loved one dreaming there’s a poignancy about it because they are so still that you can look at them in detail, yet they in their own minds are somewhere else and you can’t go there. When I paint naturalistic detail this is sometimes created by me going out and photographing; perhaps recording the shapes of leaves and the way frost can define their edges. At other times I will go out and dig a sod of earth and have it in this studio and water it every day. A buttercup might come into flower while the clump of earth is in the studio, or a creature will crawl up one of the stems – either way it’s all just drawing. I can invent and draw as I go along. Once I have got the beginnings of something, I can just keep inventing. We were having a candle-lit dinner and I could see an aura around the candle, and was not able to see beyond it very clearly. But when I put my thumb up to block out the candle’s flame the aura collapsed. The glare of the aura is actually in your eye, not around the flame. That’s interesting. So what I’m trying to do in my current painting is to show the sun hidden behind the ‘thumb’ of a church, and as you get further away from that point the colours become warmer. It has a rather poetic title: On the Finding of a Feather of a Swan. You’re on a walk (the girl in the picture is not real, she’s the spirit of the feather) you pick up the feather and it is the most perfect piece of sculpture – the most perfect thing you’ve ever seen – just discarded from a swan’s breast. That’s how this painting came about. It may be hard to see the effect I’m aiming for at this stage because when I do a painting I paint the whole thing first in opaque colours, all the detail, everything, and it’s at that stage now. Then I paint it all again in transparent colours – it’s glazing; all the early masters used glazing a lot.