“The true worth of art, as both Constable and Turner observed, lies in its authenticity”
Whether we are artists or not, for all of us memory and the experience of empathy defines both a sense of self-awareness, in relation to others, and our own sense of individuality from which we build our “thinking” and “feeling” emotional landscapes. My own art practice, as primarily a landscape painter, involves purposeful wanderings of parklands, woodlands, forests, meadows, farmlands, moorlands and heaths, mountains and hillsides, waterways, coastlines and promontories. Back in the studio, specific motifs such as trees, flowers, clouds, the sun and moon, church-spires, wayside markings and crosses, take on symbolic, metaphoric, or associative meanings, alongside explorations of colour modulation, scale and spatial geometry. In practical terms, familiarisation and authentic experiences are reinforced by an assemblage of visual, auditory, haptic and somatic material: sketches, notations, maps, guide-books, old postcards, poetry, music, photographs, and “found” natural objects, such as leaves, pine cones and sea-salt pebbles. The resultant paintings are carefully conceived re-presentations and re-compositions, which retain a figurative presence, involving a selective and interpretative process. Complex colour arrangements and applications, degrees of luminosity and “hidden geometry”, are all used so as to draw the viewer within the experience of aesthetic empathy and “that grateful sensation of inner peace and clarity”.* *’Nine Letters on Landscape Painting’, Carl Gustav Carus, 1831
