'The presence of absence'

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Norfolk is my home county and I studied fine art painting to MA at Norwich School of Art and Design, now Norwich University of the Arts 

As a figurative artist in rural Norfolk, the use of landscape underpins my visual language and acts as a vehicle for my ideas, feelings and life experiences.

My current practice is complimented by the particular demands of working with egg tempera. It is a challenging, time consuming, meditative and exacting process. However this facilitates a contemplative approach to each individual piece of work and can reveal an other worldly quality that may be held within a landscape/that may be just out of view/sight..

The challenge is to create light, shadow, form and texture, in order to absorb and transform visual clues from the physical world and reflect them back to the viewer and so offer a sense of presence. This is sought in the landscape  through layers of finely detailed, transparent or opaque, delicate but expressive mark making, layering colours over and against another, describing one shape in relation to the other.

The final image is very rarely clear to me at the onset.  It begins with an unconscious/ inner recognition of something that catches my attention and inspires exploration, be it a building, a shadow or reflection, a movement, a tree.  I collect and consider memories, visual patterns, forms, colour, texture and emotion. These resources go towards finding the underlying features latent in a landscape, intuitively trusting that, through the painting process, an inspired, creditable visual impression may come to fruition.

There are a number of artists whose work I very much appreciate and has proved invaluable in the development of my work to date are twentieth century British landscape painters, Eric Ravilious, John Nash, The British Brotherhood of Ruralists, David Inshaw and Anne Ovenden, and  another contemporary Anna Sweeten. 

Finally the late Irish artist who worked with egg tempera, Fergus Ryan whose words follow me in my work:  
               
‘But the ancient landscape is far from empty, it is everywhere filled with ‘the presence of absence’.

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