My paintings are always based on complex wild landscapes. I feel I urgently need to portray the beauty and enchantment of our world, and to try to let the viewer enjoy the peace and harmony that pure nature evokes.
I prefer my “scenes” to have no traces of human activity. I take “artist’s license” to leave out buildings, walls and fields to convey a sense of wilderness. A world without it’s human occupants leaving their mark including the interventions of agriculture, however ecological. Yes complete escapism is my aim, a strong urge to survive the turbulence and troubles of modern living.
I have returned to paint in the place where I spent lockdown 2020. It was four months in one of the most beautiful parts of central Spain, Castilla de La Mancha. That was from spring to summer……now it is autumn to winter. Frost burnt trees alongside grey-green evergreen oaks cover the steep slopes, silver reflections of the winding river that ambles between the leafless trees in the valley. In the spring, this river was a rushing torrent, speeding from the snow melt of mountains, over fantastic waterfalls and through verdant valleys onward towards the oceans many miles away.