For a long time I have been excited by the drawings that I make outside in the landscape directly in response to place and my actual physical experience of being there. I work quickly and intuitively often picking up the sticks, grasses, and stones around me to rub into the drawing or spontaneously mark make with mud and water as well as ink. I might also incorporate into my compositions rubbings from various surfaces such as tree bark, fence posts, building surfaces, farm machinery or indeed anything that I immediately experience as being a part of that landscape.
Time and time again I have found that on my return to the pod (studio) where my intention is to move things along further with canvas and paint from this initial recording phase the energy and emotive quality of the drawings gets lost in translation and I continue to like them much more than the subsequent paintings. They carry an energetic liveliness which says what I want to say about the landscape and my experience of being in it.
With the current Refuge series of paintings however, I feel like I’ve begun to bridge this subtle gap between drawing and painting that I keep falling into. Further work with resist techniques in the form of oil bars, oil paint, oil pastels and PVA glue has enabled me to freely translate the spontaneous mark making of the field drawings directly into my paintings. In his essay Notes of a Painter (1908) Henri Matisse states how "drawing must have an expansive force which gives life to the things around it" and I think that this best describes how the drawn elements can positively impact upon the surface composition of a painting bringing to it a lively immediacy that is so often lost through painting alone. Matisse also talks about how "an artist who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to another (...) must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just square it up onto a larger canvas". I would equate this to my approach of creating each time a new composition from a number of different drawings as opposed to selecting one drawing and attempting to simply recreate it on a larger scale in a different medium.
