Creative Process
I am caught in that struggle that all contemporary painters deal with - the war between image and material.
Much of my work for the past couple of decades has been rooted in the venerable tradition of the expressive landscape. I approach the work in two ways: observing and painting directly from nature with small field sketches, then creating larger studio paintings that spring from the sketches or photographs and appropriated imagery that relates to the field work. Rather than simply recording or inventing a scene, I construct the paintings through a rigorous process of adding and subtracting colour and forms into the observed principles of nature.
More recently, I have begun to work extensively on figurative pieces, which is to some extent a return to the tendencies of some of my earliest paintings. A studio space I occupied in downtown London, Ontario for several years afforded the opportunity to photograph passers-by from above, from which has developed a growing body of paintings composed from this interesting perspective. After many years of landscape painting, with its inevitable focus on the horizon line, the figures from above provide a fascinating departure.
