I’m painting this project because it is what I was doing anyway; because I wanted to see what a year’s worth would look like; because it might end up making some kind of sense or some kind of point, but I won’t know that until the end.
Why do us artists choose any subject matter? Is it because we want to see it, realise it, express it, look at it? It can be quite basic, as a purely visual exercise, we are visual artists after all. For me it is about expressing myself, it is my tool. I can’t speak publicly, I hate it, nor am I a creative writer so painting is my form of expression, and I have a lot to say.
People who follow my work will know it for being populated with trees, which for a long time I wanted to celebrate and express the way they make me feel but describing their beauty became unfulfilling and how lost we would be without them became a burgeoning thought.
The switch to more extreme forms of nature began after a long artistic block, which looking back was a result of emotional turmoil but also because of that unfulfillment within my painting.
It is nature which inspires me, it is all landscape and it is influenced from all my experiences of it; whether that is in person, from memory or photographs, or through my tv/phone screen. There’s so much I want to make work about, I can’t keep up but I’ll keep trying.