Containment Painting

Central to my paintings is the integration of hard forms with soft.  The soft forms emerge as sensual colour rhythms, disappear and sometimes re-appear, leaving the trail of an image you may recognise yet cannot place entirely. What matters most is that hard forms, whether they interrupt, block off, pierce or stand apart from the soft elements, form the coherence of the whole.  I aim to evoke a mood unique to each picture, this by suggestion: elements might put you in mind of anything from machinery to a cage or rustic gate but these are never represented literally or defined as such. My approach is inclusive as opposed to minimalistic. Even where I aim at the feel of spontaneity, precise placement of every detail is essential to my art. I am concerned with the painterly effects of colour and with formal integrity, striving to hold together in convincing co-ordination a closely worked nexus of visual motifs. I invite you to follow an 'argument' of line and colour to understand an overall harmony that avoids facile pattern making and cheaply achieved effects from extreme tonal and colour contrast.  My ideal collector is one who (apart from wanting art that looks superb on a wall!) seeks to find more and more in a painting as time goes by.