Lighting Bolt

Originally from Sydney Australia, I’m a painter and musician now living in South Devon, England. My work is inspired by both the external world around me and by our own inner spaces. I’m interested in exploring the abstract forms and shapes found in the drama and moods of the Devon landscape around me, and equally in examining how abstract form can be used to express our own inner moods and landscape.

 

I’m thus inspired to paint intuitively, reflecting on the shifts in my own inner world. I’m passionate about exploring the many ways that shape and form can form cohesive wholes, as well as how colour, shape and form can be constructed to reflect the ambiguity and uncertainty of our lives. In this way my interest is in both the simplicity and complexity of abstract form, and it is this that characterises the different subject matter of my work and my approach to it.

 

I use a variety of media including acrylics, oils, watercolour, inks, and pastels. I also like to use a variety of different surfaces. I use brushwork when capturing the movement, light and tone of my external and inner landscape, and make use of layers of brayer work, a dark palette, and iconic symbols of ‘forbidden spaces’ such as barbed wire to convey a sense of both external and internal boundaries. My paintings are not confined to one particular genre or style, I enjoy the challenge of exploring different subjects and techniques. The portfolio of my work is thus broad in scope, and I love the freedom that painting provides.

THE LIGHTNING SERIES

This series was painted during the heatwave of last summer.  The whole scenario of drought, the unusually parched landscape, the shallowing reservoirs, and the desperate need for rain reminded me of my native Australia.  At the end of droughts in Australia, the rain can be preceded by truly dramatic lightening shows.   This series of paintings ‘Lightning Bolt’, ‘Thor Striding’, and ‘Bolt from the Blue’ thus became a sort of rain-dance, a hope for rain and an end to what seemed to me here an oddly geographically mis-placed drought.  Strangely enough, while painting the third and last painting in the series ‘Bolt from the Blue’, I could hear thunder in the distance…….

Acrylic on Canvas   

55x55cm

Framed in an open frame