ABSTRACTED LANDSCAPES 1995-2013
For the next two decades I continued to paint landscape, exploring the rich terrain between abstraction and figuration. Generally, the direction of travel was from gestural and energetic abstract works toward more spacious, luminous, ethereal, still and silent paintings. Carl Jung’s belief that humans produce in art the images needed for their souls to transform makes sense of much of my work. Looking back, it is strikingly clear that as my inner and outer life became more troubled and painful over time, so my work gradually became ever more serene. Creating a visual refuge of calm, silence and stillness was clearly a kind of compensation for what was missing in my life. The primary subject matter of all these paintings however, was always landscape. Though long-distance walks in remote places became a thing of the past once our children were born, I would take daily short, slow walks down the lanes and through the fields and woods that surrounded our Somerset home. I found it astonishing what wonders could be seen when I took the time to look. All I did in the studio was a response to those experiences of the natural world, and an attempt to condense, distil out and evoke something of its beauty, in the hope that others might also glimpse the world with fresh eyes. The flow of abstracted landscape paintings culminated in a body of work produced between 2012-14 with an increasingly pure focus on colour and light. These spacious, luminous and emptied out ‘Light’ paintings, in turn, opened the way for my journey into the Arctic and the more figurative explorations of Arctic light and space that followed.
Left: Towards Dusk, 2002 Oil on linen 76 x 61 cm