soCurio | art is for everyone

I paint landscapes, specifically my work is about “place”, inspired by various locations but abstracted from reality. I paint what I see and what I remember. I am interested in the transcendent power of the land, and seek to convey a subjective yet highly emotional response to nature. I have always been compelled by that distant line that divides the sky from the ground, what one sees depends on the person, it might be spirituality, a fear of the unknown, or the manifestation of a greater power or presence. I paint perhaps wanting to know what lies beyond . The underlining themes in my work deal with mortality and sublimity, distilling fleeting atmospheric conditions on canvas which have the power to move the viewer. I am committed to the medium of oil painting with a specific interest in the sensuous treatment of colour combined with the formal elements of pictorial properties and like the mid-19th century Romantic Landscape painters; J.M.W Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, I’m searching for those same transcendent themes that exemplified their work while trying to bring landscape into a contemporary and universal context. While the material quality of my painting has always been dominant and while I pursue the “pure” aspect of the medium by creating glazes both translucent and opaque, I am exploring compositional tensions within the painting. The viewer is compelled by something that resembles landscape but also focuses on the material and textual quality of the paint. More recently, I have begun to introduce representational elements into the work, moving the meaning of the work from purely abstracted landscapes into a narrative story relating to memory, history, myth and legend. Collectively my work affirms the heroic aspects of landscape painting, I continue to conjure up the spirits of both post-war Abstract Expressionism and traditional 19th Century landscape painting, but ultimately the painting constituting a sort of universe with its own laws, the only rule being that the painting obey its own laws with as much clarity, confidence and self-possession as possible.