My training was in design but there was always a need for a more personal expression so after I moved to the Borders I started working with watercolour, then acrylic and oil; for landscape and still-life in a fairly traditional way .
I’m aware that I need my work to have meaning but this doesn’t usually happen at the start of a project its just that I see meaning after I’ve finished and I enjoy that the process has revealed something of my inner life. I’ve seen this happening more with printmaking, especially with my woodcuts ‘Maya Narrative I, II + III’ where the woodgrain revealed the images whilst the narrative developed. ‘Seeding the Universe’ arose from the memory of an article I’d read about comets and how they brought bacteria with them when they entered the Earths atmosphere and my linocut ‘Pathogen Production’ which I made during lockdown (surprise, surprise!). Somehow making work that to my mind is beautiful and complete makes those pathogens easier to deal with. That’s not to say the unconscious hasn’t been revealed in some of my still-life paintings; those quiet pre-painting times when objects are arranged together to make relationships of form, colour, tone, scale and emotion.