For many years now, I have considered myself a landscape painter, but my pieces also overlap into other genres: portraiture, abstraction, and still life. Recently, my aim has been to further fuse and distill these forms. This effort to merge genres has led to a compression in which landscape coalesced into an object, then that object took on life and became an animal, human or otherwise. Consequently, in the paintings of this period, the first genre that strikes the viewer is portraiture. Ambiguous in form and scale, sometimes the face is a pumpkin and the body a landscape. The painted exteriors serve a double function, to cloak the body and to offer an insight into the real self.
These portrait landscapes maintain references to various things, vegetal, animal, and mineral. Some of them take the form of horses, an animal that had a strong presence in my early painting career. These rediscovered horses are warm unstable land masses to be navigated. Historically, the horse has embodied a desire for power and strength. We have perceived them as loyal. They are animals that we have obliged to carry us into war. Some of the horses in these works are semi-concealed by an armour that covers the eyes. I feel that the physical presence of the horse is stronger without its gaze. The stare of the animal creates a distance from the viewer. Without this stare, the animal’s body becomes more closely related to our own and its surface becomes a landscape in which we can visually travel.
In these recent pieces, the humans or animals portrayed are roughly life-size. This adds to the sense that we are standing in front of a real entity. This is particularly noticeable in the paintings such as Horse, and Guardians. The person in Portrait of a Woman is slightly larger than life. The scale is part of her force. In Riding Towards Dusk, the figure sits comfortably in the right angle of the picture frame, moving towards an objective which is unseen but hinted at by the target around the horse’s eye. This image, like the others in this series, provokes conflicting feelings of solace and malaise.
I am wrestling with the idea of landscape, of what we do to the environment, and the effect that this changing environment has on ourselves. In many of the paintings, landscape becomes a kind of garment worn by the subject. I want the viewer to perceive the natural environment as something we inhabit but that is also imprinted on us. The landscape is a pervading presence we cannot escape.