After living and working away for many years, I returned to my home town in the East Riding and I found that my attachment to the area, particularly the river, is much stronger than I had realised. Much of my drawing and painting is the result of that ‘rediscovery’.
The Holderness landscape on the north bank of the River Humber is a very flat, agricultural landscape. Much of it is formed from marsh land reclaimed from the river and is intensively farmed. The wide, flat, expansive fields present a particular challenge, especially where the only vertical accent may be the telephone and electricity poles or the occasional copse of trees.
I work with the landscape as subject matter because I like to be outside and in the landscape. I do not try to produce an accurate representation of the landscape, rather my work is about being in the landscape – my aim is to recreate something of my experience of being in that landscape at that particular time of year.
All of the drawings and paintings start with sketches made on location and made over many visits over periods of weeks or months at various times of the year. The subsequent studio paintings developed from the sketches are made by applying many layers of colour and sometimes selectively scratching through one layer to reveal the layer beneath.
It is a process that I have come to see as, in some ways, echoing the changes in the land itself.
