South East from Monteoriolo 2001
Oil on canvas, 120 x 175 cm

On Painting

 

If there's a single element that binds my pictures together, it would be light.

Beyond the subject of every piece, I'm chasing after the light as it passes over surfaces and planes and empty space. In doing so, I'm attempting to articulate simple statements about beauty which have a tranquil potency and are truthful.

I'm interested in light, sometimes in the most mundane way. The physical world we move through is wholly described by intensities of darkness and light. It's all around us, omnipresent and unresolved in a constant cycle of adjustment - casting shadow, adding brilliance and generating reflection.

This same darkness and light exists within us as well. Throughout our lives, we wrestle with the perpetual puzzle of reconciling the love, fear, joy, resentment and tenderness that we experience as we inhabit the everyday.

These disordered layers of ourselves are forever in motion. Occasionally, as we struggle to grasp a foothold, there is an inexplicable pause; we are thrown clear into an oasis of stillness, where the labyrinth of competing forces are all at once, taut and perfectly balanced. Only in hindsight, after it has passed, are we aware of the unbridled power and beauty that was revealed to us during that sublime moment. We realise that for an instant, we briefly glimpsed something of the truth.

The art I respond to most directly conjures up the sense of this moment. It is also what I am seeking for myself when I'm in the studio making my own work.