I paint things which are important to me – which are “everyday” things, my reality, my garden, my house, my walks, my dog – but I try to go deeper, mostly by the application of paint in a wayward fashion. I let it – sometimes force it to – run and dribble, scrape it off with palette knife. I paint new paintings over older ones, so that the old textures come through.

Here my garden and open studio door, celebrating four years of making the garden happen, and four years (five now!) of painting in this studio. I grew most of the prairie flowers from seed, and have a greenhouse full of tomatoes in the summer. Now the echinaceas and prairie mallows self-seed in a riotous pinky-purple chaos, buzzing with bees and a few butterflies flitting about. Also I have a thing about watering cans. You can see the influence of Paul Klee and Bonnard in this, even perhaps Matisse.

Recently I have added lurking presences, harmless in themselves, like the grass snake and the toad, but suggestive of an inner life. Then with the frustration of current affairs, some really sinister presences, the Chinooks that haunted our skies here in Fife, flying low, for two weeks this spring, and the bombers and fighters we see practicing or carrying out their deadly missions, have arrived in some of my paintings.

At the same time, an appreciation of nature, and of my interactions with it, suffuses the stuff of paint itself, how it runs and flows, makes sedimentary layers, whether watercolour or oil or acrylic. My oil paintings are structured on a background of collage, sometimes visible, sometimes not, of playing with paint on a flat canvas, of letting wet paint, or solvent, flow down the painting, cutting through what is there already or adding layers. From this abstract beginning I can see how the painting will take me further into figuration, and the whole process can take months or years.

 

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Tell me you’ll come home (SOLD)

acrylic, paper collage, cold wax and oils on canvas, 2024, 120 x 100 cm.

Now in the collection of the School of Sport and Education, Moray House, Edinburgh University.