"I’ve mainly painted completely abstract works before but have been drawn to landscapes of late - the sky in particular, hence the exhibition title, ‘Skywards’. Every painting in the show started with the sky. It’s hard to find inspiration in dull winter days and it wasn’t until that glorious few weeks in May that something clicked. Now that it’s summer, I can't imagine it being any other way. It’s quite evident that the works I completed in the early part of the year were informed by the leaden skies of winter - I think that I had just forgotten what colour looked like. Suddenly Spring arrived with a huge burst of sunshine, highlighting the luminous green and I moved outside to paint faster with acrylic, which was ideal because it dries quickly and is extremely bright. I’ve painted surrounded by cows on Hungerford Common, on top of my car in Durley and in the verges of numerous country lanes swathed in froths of cow-parsley. These works were an immediate reaction to the changing sky around me that I couldn’t resist. It’s been such a happy feeling unpacking an old square biscuit tin that I use when I’m on the move – just big enough for two brushes, paints, a tea-towel and an old milk bottle for water. We are so lucky to live in this part of the world where there are so many incredible views. It was by chance that I found myself parking at Martinsell, to discover that the hill was dotted all over with dandy-lion clocks. As the evening light faded and everything fell into shadow they were almost illuminated. It was magical and they have become a motif in a lot of my recent work. The brooding oil canvases of darker days have definitely earnt their place too though because although it may sound like a bit of a cliché we all long for the blue-sky underneath, it’s just harder to remember it’s there sometimes. I’m hugely inspired by Rothko’s colour field paintings. I have yearned to paint the mist rising blended into indigo of a February morning, but so often it’s fleeting. Yves Klein’s 1960’s IKB 79 has been another huge influence and is essentially a blue canvas hanging in the Tate Modern. Love it or loathe it, our own desire to create meaning is reflected in how we feel when we stare up at a cloudless sky. We get lost in the lack of stimulus and there’s something immersive about it, boundless and eternal. Painters have striven to depict concepts like ‘love’ over the centuries but I think that the most effective way to try to capture something so intangible is to be a little abstract. We spend so much time looking down when there’s an ever-changing canvas above us & nothing that I’ve painted could rival that."
Skywards will be running from Thursday 3rd July - Saturday 12th July
Open 10am - 4pm daily with exception of Sunday
By Appointment outside of these times