For a detailed account of my career you should go to CV and Exhibition History and seeing as “a picture paints a thousand words” the pictures in the Landscape Paintings section illustrate an earlier part of my career.
UPDATE: March 2020
Thirteen years ago, at the end of my MFA study, I had deconstructed my art, and was exploring new directions. I had moved on from painting landscapes, and at that time I was painting with light. Since then my art has been an amazing and evolving adventure. Through light painting, abstraction, mark making and playing and exploring with paint I have learned to work from a totally intuitive place. To quote Paul Gauguin “I shut my eyes in order to see.”
Just as nature has cycles, I find myself returning to an interest in the land, pulled by the earth's energies and rhythms. I have been exploring imagery around elements of land and sea, coastal estuaries and tidal flow and rivers; constantly changing environments due to nature’s rhythms, tidal cycles and weather patterns. I am increasingly drawn to work from nature again. Not copying nature but experiencing and realising its energy and power, its balance and harmony and it’s rhythms that have their foundation in the cycles and repetitions of nature.
Thirteen years ago, at the end of my MFA study, I had deconstructed my art, and was exploring new directions. I had moved on from painting landscapes, and at that time I was painting with light. Since then my art has been an amazing and evolving adventure. Through light painting, abstraction, mark making and playing and exploring with paint I have learned to work from a totally intuitive place. To quote Paul Gauguin “I shut my eyes in order to see.”
Just as nature has cycles, I find myself returning to an interest in the land, pulled by the earth's energies and rhythms. I have been exploring imagery around elements of land and sea, coastal estuaries and tidal flow and rivers; constantly changing environments due to nature’s rhythms, tidal cycles and weather patterns. I am increasingly drawn to work from nature again. Not copying nature but experiencing and realising its energy and power, its balance and harmony and it’s rhythms that have their foundation in the cycles and repetitions of nature.
Four years ago ..... September 2016
What I’d like to talk about is where I am now, how I got here, and why I made the move.
After twenty solo exhibitions of mainly landscape paintings, my career was going well. I loved painting landscape and had great adventures traveling on my own exploring parts of the world and parts of New Zealand. My exhibitions nearly always sold out. However, in 2005 I started questioning my direction.
I made some changes in my approach by painting darker, moodier landscapes, with less colour, thinking that might be the answer, but there was still something missing at that time.
I needed to a change in direction. I needed to take that next step, to challenge myself and not to worry if I made mistakes, or if things didn’t always work out. But it was a hard thing to ask it of myself, to give up what I was doing so successfully, but I knew that to have any credibility to myself I had to change direction dramatically and take a big risk.
I went to back to University, entering into the Master of Fine Arts programme. My statement of intent was that I was looking for a new direction in my art, that wasn’t simply a visual and pictorial response to my environment; an art practice with more personal relevance and artistic integrity. I took on the challenge of the MFA to find within myself a new way of thinking.
I deconstructed myself and my art completely and built it again from the bottom up.
It took two years but it worked, and it led me to a more meaningful and personally relevant way of working. At this point you might like to look at my Light Paintings, which were the end result of my two years Masters study. My Masters work, both the thesis and light paintings, were definitely the catalyst for the shift in my painting practice, as it is today.
What do I mean by 'light painting’? It was my process of making marks (sweeping lines, circles, dashes and flicks) with a range of coloured lights in a completely darkened space. This allowed me to freely move around in quite an uninhibited way; like dancing in the dark.
To facilitate this, I hired a storage unit, blackened the interior walls and floor, set up my camera on a tripod, switched off the light and used time-elapse photography to record my movements and ‘performance’ using various types of lights to make different types of ‘marks’.
The freedom of that experience changed my art practice for ever.
My current large acrylic paintings are a direct result of the mark-making in the light paintings. I now work totally intuitively with paint, with no composition design or planning at all, and the painting evolves by itself. The first of these works were very loose and energetic with big brush strokes on a bodily scale. Just two of these works are in my upcoming exhibition; ‘Whirl’ and ‘Red Green’ .... and possibly 'Tempest'. These colourful, energetic first paintings were solely sweeping marks and lines. As I have continued to work in this genre and explore this concept in my painting, an evolution is occurring as I introduce different materials and techniques. My fascination is with lines and how they influence each other, and in my more recent pieces in this show, along with the brushing, pouring, dripping and flicking, the viewer will also see the introduction of some stencilling and spraying. I am completely enamoured with the artists' materials and products that are now available within the acrylic range of media. Please check back often as I continue to explore and my work evolves.
What I’d like to talk about is where I am now, how I got here, and why I made the move.
After twenty solo exhibitions of mainly landscape paintings, my career was going well. I loved painting landscape and had great adventures traveling on my own exploring parts of the world and parts of New Zealand. My exhibitions nearly always sold out. However, in 2005 I started questioning my direction.
I made some changes in my approach by painting darker, moodier landscapes, with less colour, thinking that might be the answer, but there was still something missing at that time.
I needed to a change in direction. I needed to take that next step, to challenge myself and not to worry if I made mistakes, or if things didn’t always work out. But it was a hard thing to ask it of myself, to give up what I was doing so successfully, but I knew that to have any credibility to myself I had to change direction dramatically and take a big risk.
I went to back to University, entering into the Master of Fine Arts programme. My statement of intent was that I was looking for a new direction in my art, that wasn’t simply a visual and pictorial response to my environment; an art practice with more personal relevance and artistic integrity. I took on the challenge of the MFA to find within myself a new way of thinking.
I deconstructed myself and my art completely and built it again from the bottom up.
It took two years but it worked, and it led me to a more meaningful and personally relevant way of working. At this point you might like to look at my Light Paintings, which were the end result of my two years Masters study. My Masters work, both the thesis and light paintings, were definitely the catalyst for the shift in my painting practice, as it is today.
What do I mean by 'light painting’? It was my process of making marks (sweeping lines, circles, dashes and flicks) with a range of coloured lights in a completely darkened space. This allowed me to freely move around in quite an uninhibited way; like dancing in the dark.
To facilitate this, I hired a storage unit, blackened the interior walls and floor, set up my camera on a tripod, switched off the light and used time-elapse photography to record my movements and ‘performance’ using various types of lights to make different types of ‘marks’.
The freedom of that experience changed my art practice for ever.
My current large acrylic paintings are a direct result of the mark-making in the light paintings. I now work totally intuitively with paint, with no composition design or planning at all, and the painting evolves by itself. The first of these works were very loose and energetic with big brush strokes on a bodily scale. Just two of these works are in my upcoming exhibition; ‘Whirl’ and ‘Red Green’ .... and possibly 'Tempest'. These colourful, energetic first paintings were solely sweeping marks and lines. As I have continued to work in this genre and explore this concept in my painting, an evolution is occurring as I introduce different materials and techniques. My fascination is with lines and how they influence each other, and in my more recent pieces in this show, along with the brushing, pouring, dripping and flicking, the viewer will also see the introduction of some stencilling and spraying. I am completely enamoured with the artists' materials and products that are now available within the acrylic range of media. Please check back often as I continue to explore and my work evolves.
