I am nature. Dots and landscape painting

The British landscape. Living in south west England means I spend a lot of time in the local landscape, especially on Dartmoor, a beautiful ancient landscape in all seasons, where everything is always changing. The subject of my paintings is this change itself, the depiction of this changing light, and how the landscape can look so different through the seasons, the time of day, and the weather. You can’t paint landscapes in England without painting the weather. 

I would like my landscape paintings to be the result of a dialogue between myself and the environment I am in. I feel that any landscape is always alive; changing, growing, and my paintings are the result of a communion I have with the landscape. My life pervades the landscape both spiritually and physically.

I use small brushmarks or dots to build up the image. Let’s say for arguments sake I use a pointillist style. I see each dot as a jewel sparkling with life. Each dot is a thought, like a full stop and a comma, an exclamation mark and a question mark. All around each dot are others sparkling like gems in their interrelations. It’s not me it’s the colours. Dots have the beauty and purity of colours, and while unchanging in themselves, they appear so differently in context, more beautifully expressing their intrinsic qualities. They are the simplest and purest expression of colour as it is, like musical notes. The dots also unintentionally appear to express rhythms and patterns on the painted surface which reflect rhythms and patterns in nature. I do not consciously seek these rhythms but they delight and surprise me in hindsight. It is important that I don’t seek these as I work, and in fact I actively avoid any kind of schema when painting. At all costs I want to avoid mannerisms of style.

These rhythms are not sought but appear to manifest naturally in spite of myself. I am nature as Pollock said, and nature must be present, evidence welling spontaneously in the traces of my actions. There are deeper realities, infinitely profound and immeasurable, that I cannot consciously perceive as I move and act but they are revealed like ghosts in the marks I leave afterwards. Rather a life print than a footprint.

This rhythm is more important to me than colour, being a sculptor, but it gets lost and harder to see the more I work with colour.