Statement

I see all artists as working in traditions, even the most outrageous. The tradition I like to think I belong to has it’s routes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century representational art, just on the cusp of modernism and being heavily influenced by it, but still not quite wanting to drop the discipline of the Academy and the skill of drawing.

This is painting that is emphatically concerned with the real world and how to record it, by people like: Sergeant, Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, Tom Thomson, and in England: William Nicholson, Stanley Spencer,  all the way through to Lucien Freud and even Howard Hodgkin.

In New England, George Nick has particularly influenced me, both with his art but also with how to be an artist, and don’t think I would be painting now but for George’s encouragement.

My most recent work has tended to be paintings done over other, older paintings of my own. I like exploiting the ambiguities of the clash of the two different pictures, the fight for clarity, as well as the excitement that comes with what sometimes feels like an act of bravery, especially if I think the painting underneath worked. The word “palimpsest” springs to mind. An erasing of the past with the present, reflecting changes in how I view my life now.