The landscape and lines created by the human form inspire my work. I’m showing pictures from three periods. First is work over a number of years of life drawing, images made on the day. Traditionally, the scene is set for a group, and the challenge is in exploring that human landscape in sometimes less than optimum conditions. The second is a project where I searched out opportunities to draw movement in situ – yoga and ballet classes, workshops with models moving to music. The resulting series refined those quick sketches, capturing action, a pose or a pause and finding the connections between the different disciplines. More recent work synthesises the figure in abstract settings using my own photographs or sports images from newspapers as a starting point.
This is my first time at Artweeks and as a latecomer to my own art practice, my work shows me running to make up time. I’m not so much self-taught as self-guided. Short courses, workshops, gallery visits, focussed weeks away from home are the equivalent of walks where you’re handed a route, a map and the destination. On the way I owe much to artist friends who’ve been generous with directions and encouragement to keep going. Back home, the mainstays have been the Deddington life-drawing group - an untutored day a week which I attended for five years, a structured year’s distance learning with the Open College of the Arts, and more recently a decade of working with a drawing group in the Ashmolean under the guidance of Kassandra Isaacson. I continue to experiment with composition and scale, using colour washes and inks, sometimes pastels or acrylic paint, influenced by artists both known and lesser known.