I love the water, to stand at the edge of solid land and watch the liquid ebb and flow, to absorb the stillness or battle the wildness. As a child I spent hours pottering in the stream at the bottom of my street, as a teenager I flung myself down the fish ladder on a metal tea tray, as an adult I find myself in lakes and rivers, docks and oceans. I have lived by the unpredictability of the North Sea and now by the more subdued, long line of the River Mersey.
And with water comes sky, big wide open skies that melt in pastel tones or hang over our heads in heavy leaden greys.
I love the motion, the passing of light between the clouds and the unexpected colours that dusk and dawn conjure up. I love the slowness of the sun disappearing through the horizon or how frantically clouds can scud and collide on stormy days.
As a relatively new painter, these skies have had a huge influence on my work. I enjoy the process of layering paint to capture colour and light, trying to evoke the movement of clouds and the tonal shifts of different hours or changing seasons.
But my work is also firmly rooted in Modernism and architectural structure and Sky Forms have allowed me to explore both.This is a series of paintings that glimpses changing skies as they pass around, above and through architectural spaces. Angular negative spaces depict the edges of buildings or the planes of built surfaces creating forms which are textural, colourful and graphic.
Take a look at the Sky Form collection here.