Current Practice

In trying to deal with this I have found my practice often drawn closer to the works of those painters who have gone this way before. (For there's nothing new or unique about my experiences - except that they're happening to me.) I am finding that the handling of paint, especially oil paint, can create an equivalence with the atmosphere and experience of the landscape. Then the paint not only suggests clouds and mists, say, but the manipulation of it when I'm painting parallels my experience on the hills - so for me the act of painting is a re-creation of that original experience.

And the picture, like the landscape itself, contains other levels hidden away beneath the surface - hidden histories. Beneath the surface of every one of my paintings lies buried a history of earlier drafts of the work, earlier attempts, mistakes, erasures, scrapings off, wipings away, demolitions and rebuildings, changes of direction, even of purpose. And memories - my memories of the original experience, my intended vision, connections with the works of earlier artists, with other ideas and preoccupations and histories of art. And never forget what the viewer brings to the work and thereby completes it, making it into a work of art at last.

What's eventually visible is only surface, the final draft; the semi-accidental, abandoned byproduct of the recovery of memory and vision.