Drawings
I always need to draw to understand and internalise the forms, the light, the poetic possibilities of places within nature. Through drawing and observation of a landscape; fish, trees, water, birds, I absorb on a subconscious level a particular place with its sense of time and atmosphere. Being there in the present, I have no set idea of how drawing nourishes painting, but it does. As I draw I am connected to nature and to a deeper well within myself. These drawings are a series of tropical images in ink made from nature and pencil drawings that form a body of work and that are incorporated into my current oil paintings.
Drawing with line I have explored the experience of being in a disused industrial space, an old, abandoned sugar cane factory that conveys a sense of time passing. Imbued with the demise of an industry and the implicit social changes, the atmosphere I sought to express is one of loss and presence. Industrial machinery and bygone Sugar factories fascinate me, ‘Ingenious’ as they were called. Some factories date back to 1640.