Location: Canada
Innate sense of design and colour has always drawn me to oil painting. Although mostly self taught in the fall 1999 I found myself on Vancouver Island and enrolled at Victoria College of Art. This was an enlightening experience resulting in freedom of expression.
Images are alive with movement and dramatic lighting dancing on the forms as they shimmer with the change of light from break of day to lights out.
Intuitive painting gives me the freedom to express with marks and ideas that are fresh at that moment. Composition and dramatic lighting whether present in a real vista or reconstructed for appeal and emotional response add to the drama. Colours that meld together and excite each other mix optically creating new hues. Palette knife marks give the illusion of depth within the paint. Imagery from nature’s visual clues etched in memory. Siphoned imagery strengthens intuitive, spontaneous painting sometimes pushed to the edge of realism and abstract.
Passion is provoked in me by nature’s various, sometimes violent, cloud displays, portrayed through hues, shapes, intensity, and mark making evidenced in the scenes displayed by nature’s daily dramas. Nature displays her rugged beauty textures and colour. Nature is the true artist.
Still Life and Figurative paintings are just another landscape. I find that figure painting, whether it is a dancer in front of me or a posing model, is very gratifying. Facial studies reach deep into the soul and psychology of the subject. People’s faces are like a novel and sometimes give away the path taken while mysteriously keeping secrets. Expressions, mannerisms, authoritative presence, compassionate kindness, innocence, youth and wisdom with age depict the journey. My goal is to capture the inner soul.Most of my paintings unless it is a portrait are from the imagination. Sometimes it is a place I have visited and choose to paint when I get to the studio. Others are deep my soul and need to be expressed.
I just respond to the paint on the canvas and it develops into a painting.
Other times I paint in the method of the old masters, perhaps in still life or portraits. I sometimes use the Grisaille method of painting from the old masters. This involves preparing a perfect image in charcoal, sealing it and glazing many layers of paint till it is done.
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