240x176cms
oil on canvas 100x100 cms
I have been making a lot of drawings recently, although only showing one here. A visitor was enquiring as to whether I draw for a specific painting, or, whether the latter might be derived via osmosis from the former. It was an interesting question. I almost never prepare for a painting with a drawing but drawing takes placeable the time and must be a preparation of sorts. There are lots of drawings, ( there will be a large bonfire one day) but they are never made as a direct starting point for a painting. There is no drawing from which the above painting is derived. However, it must be that, with all of the drawings that proceed and follow and are made at the some time as the painting there has to be a cross fertilisation of ideas.
I cannot help but wonder as to whether my paintings, which are so much about the perception of landscape, are also about the perception of loss, for what I once had or thought that I had and would have again. I am going again and again into my workspace and starting over: going forward anyway.
I was born and raised in England which must have something to do with it. There was no really wild nature in the south of the country but one made one's own and by the time that I found myself engaged in the drawing and painting of it it was clear that I was engaged in making my own world, a place where imagination and history and future and desire co-existed in a fragile bubble. I used to visit a row of Lombardy poplars in a field, with a barn and then, at almost the same time that I read Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Binsey Poplars, they were felled and I never went there again.
Now I plant my own trees and make my own landscape, which for a time will be a reference to mine for that which I still need to do .
