2009 onwards
My work has been primarily concerned with the landscape of the Scottish Highlands and Islands – it’s topography, it’s wide open spaces, big skies, shores, rocks and its human heritage. I enjoy the uncertain spaces (where land and sea, manmade and natural, ancient and familiar, bleak and abundant, visibility and opacity meet), and I delight in its unexpected, sometimes jarring colours.
Landscape painting has been ‘set aside’ in recent years due to disability. Whilst I can still access the outdoors (albeit it in a much-restricted way), I used to make extensive use of painting en plein air in my landscape painting practice – something I now find very difficult – and I’ve not yet learned to square that circle.
Also, I’ve struggled with my massively-changed relationship with ‘the great outdoors’ – it’s something I still view and admire, but it’s equally not something I am able to explore or experience in the same way that I once did. It no longer feels like ‘my territory’. Whilst not directly replicable in paint, the sounds, the smells, the interactions with weather, the rush of endorphins, the ‘dance’ of moving your body through hiking (and their resonance with the physically of painting) all contributed to my painting practice. All those things have changed for me (though I have begun to form a new, slower, lower, less endorphin-driven, more detail-concerned and more intimate relationship with the coastal environment, which brings forth creative output).
