The idea for the paintings arose from a series of sketchbook drawings made during a journey by bus through Cantabria. The rapid fragmentary nature of the drawings, made while traveling through the countryside, is developed through watercolour and oil paintings.
The work attempts to convey the shifting viewpoints and sensations of moving in the landscape, and is concerned with the proposition of how to represent time and fleeting movement through the static nature of the painting.
WATERCOLOURS
The natural qualities of the medium, its tendencies to flow, to accumulate in blobs and its transparency, are exploited to convey a sense of immediacy and transience. For this reason many of the works in this medium are quite small; a tiny mark can take on the dimensions of a bush, a feint trace a memory of an undefined feature at the edge of the visual field, or the grandure of a far distant mountain.
OIL PAINTINGS
The variations in application of the medium, thin and thick, smooth and scumbled etc are not intended as descriptive of elements in the landscape but rather used to draw in the spectator to the dynamics of the painting.
Speed and movement are suggested by the long dragged brush marks.
The Spanish light and the bare warm Cantabrian landscape is evoked by the colour, often sliced through by the ‘unnatural’ blacks and greys of the road surface.