On the way to the well
My studio is situated behind Trengwainton gardens in Cornwall, between the holy Wells of Sancreed and Madron. I walk this area and across the Penwith Moors as part of my daily practice. The gardens and woodland near my studio are overgrown and overwhelmed by nonindigenous plants brought back from colonised lands.
Close by, the trees of the holy wells are hanging with prayers, the ground around the wells, is dank and moist , trodden, footsteps have imprinted themselves in the mud for centuries as people ceremoniously made their way through the bushes and brambles, under the dark canopy of trees, to attach their clouties full of prayers and hope for healing or better fortune.
The expectation of magic is a strong lure to the well, superstitions and lore abound, pain, death and life, human, animal , local fauna, tied in together in the seasonal
rituals that preserve the continuity of life, local identities and communities.
On the hills the ancient granite monuments stand with their imagined occult ceremonies. I grew up in Europe where shrines were commonplace along the roads and on the mountain side. The memory of these shrines appears in my paintings like little idols of devotional desire, they are also part of my history, of my layers and my landscape.
Colour is an essential part of my paintings; the colour goes through a long process of layering, shifting, replacing, and arriving. In some paintings, I like to concentrate the colour as if it had been through a reduction, cooking over time, it gets darker and more intense. I am interested at how colour can affect forms as they lay beside each other and how this can be used to conjure sensations and emotions held by the subject matter. The traces of the process remain visible in part as past layers move in and out of site depending on the opacity or transparency of the paint and my personal handling of the paint.
My work is not easily categorized. There is something surreal, romantic, folk and visionary about my paintings; European surrealism, abstraction and fauvism were the formative influences in my early development as an artist, and while I don’t fix myself in any particular genre, I owe to these a certain legacy in the evolution of my own language and sense of aesthetic, to these I also add the rich heritage of the modernist and surrealist artists who walked, and worked, in Cornwall.
Image : The visitor in the garden, Newlyn Gallery the Exchange
