Drawings, Paintings & other Art

I have chosen to reference the topography of the Chiltern Hills as the basis of my visual art practice during 2013. I use my physical experience of this landscape to articulate form, atmospherics, qualities of light and the feelings of being in these places, alongside my personal preoccupations with the ancient, the residual, permanence / impermanence, decay and renaissance, as well as ideas of threat, solitude and exposure, that coalesce as intrinsic conceptual strands in these drawings of an area that, while well populated, extensively agricultural and sited relatively close to a major city, seems to retain a very strong connection to, and residual memory of, our ancestors lives. I choose drawing as my principle medium for these pieces because it is an instinctive, inherently human activity that I empathise with, modest yet immediate, a direct visceral engagement that can be both spontaneous and nuanced, able to capture the essence of the transient landscape through a process of detailed mark-making, subtle textural surface layering, carefully modulated monochromes and delicate delineation of a cohesive pictorial surface.At a purely visual level, I am focussed on defining an expressive, pared-back visual language, a lucid vocabulary of marks, gestures, colour and tonality that can form a personal syntax with which to express and consolidate my experiential enquiry of this particular landscape.