It is the smallest of things that give us the greatest moments – contentment, joy, fulfillment, even pain. And happiness is transient.

What I have come to know is that it is the journey that is important, made interesting and rich by all we encounter on the way. We dream, we act, we progress. And then we fall. What to do? Pick ourselves up, and start again.

My creative work is itself a journey, and much of it is also about the process of journeying, one foot solidly on the ground, and head in the clouds, both a physical act and a form of dreaming.

Paintings and poems have starting points in reality, but as they progress, there is a delving into the unconscious and subconscious. The product – the work – is a combination of fleeting glimpses to memory and soul, to narrative and moments of enlightenment, all wrapped up in an exploration of colour, form, texture, scale, media and mark, or in the case of poems, words, phrases, mood, pace and rhythm.

My Creative Practice

Painting, the more visual of my activities, provides an ongoing opportunity to explore life as I find it – with its ups and downs – and colour above all else sets the tone. I like to work on medium to large scale pieces, sometimes making composite works to overcome the restrictions imposed by the size of my studio. The large works are often quite involved, painted as they are over a long period of time, and incorporating as they do things that happen in my personal life and in the world. However, I indulge in smaller pieces too – explorations of media and ideas that sometimes have a directness, freshness and clarity to them. This website attempts to show a little of both.

I am a musician too, and writer, and at various times have focused more on one than the other, finding it difficult to juggle the requirements of all. I enjoy when they cross over, one to the other.

As to the influence of music, it is there in the paintings, not least in the compositional elements and the relationships that exist between pieces.

In recent times, I have found a fluidity between the acts of painting and writing, in particular poetry.

For me, a painting is a visual poem

THE GATHERER

In the corner behind the door

is a repository for little objects of beauty –

an altar with no specific deity, Athena perhaps, or Brigid

(flaming Celtic goddess of creativity)…

On the predella are charcoal drawings of circles, a pot, three tiles,

and metal bell from Prague; a card-holder with curlequied edging,

random images from Pettway, Poulton, and Van Kampen,

and circles of Hilma af Klimt. There are rounded forms echoed

in ceramic plate and bowl, a blue and white delft mill,

and Vietnamese figurine in silver plate.

A disease, they say, the hoarding gene. On the TV, a presenter

introduces a lady who crawls to bed above stairs we cannot see…

She has spent a lifetime filling holes.

With the zeal of one who has tidied a little, I think:

Not that bad yet, then remember when the ladder stood

beside the back door, how I passed it over and over –

Until it was no longer there.

Ideas

There is an idea or notion that exists at the start of a work, but as time passes, other thoughts enter and are subsumed, the work often going to unexpected places.

Indeed, many works have the same starting idea, but totally different conclusions.

In the end, the ‘finished’ piece is a little history of some of the artist’s obsessions.

When the piece is small and appears ‘simple’, know too, it has been a long time coming, not just from the start of my creative practices, but long before, to my childhood and life experiences…

As time goes by, I will elaborate more on aspects of this in my Blog.