Looking back over my recent blog posts, I realised there is a missing chapter in the story of my work.
Last autumn I wrote about building the Art 4 Homes website and moving much of my earlier work there. At the time, I mentioned that I wanted to focus more clearly on the paintings that felt most representative of where my work was heading.
What I did not fully explain was how and why that direction began to change
Working Smaller
For many years I produced large paintings, up to and including canvases measuring four to six feet across. I still enjoy working on larger scale, but increasingly my back problems have made handling and stretching larger canvases more difficult than they once were.
Rather than seeing this as a limitation, I began to think of it as an opportunity to work more selectively and with greater focus.
Returning to the Landscape
After a period of working in more abstract ways, I found myself drawn back towards recognisable landscape. Not in a purely realistic sense, but through a balance between abstraction and representation.
The resulting paintings sit somewhere between observation and interpretation, using texture, colour and structure to evoke a sense of place rather than describe every detail.
Seeing the Land from Above
One of the most significant developments has been my growing fascination with aerial perspectives.
Looking down on fields, coastlines and shifting patterns in the landscape has opened up a new way of seeing. From above, familiar places become arrangements of colour, shape and line, where roads, hedgerows and boundaries create an abstract geometry while still retaining a strong connection to the land itself.
These aerial landscape paintings combine my long-standing interest in abstraction with a renewed engagement with the natural world.
Open Horizons
Alongside the aerial work, I continue to paint coastal landscapes and seascapes. Both subjects share a similar concern with distance, weather and open space.
Whether viewed from above or across the horizon, the paintings are rooted in a desire to capture the feeling of stepping back and seeing the wider landscape.
A Clearer Direction
Over the past year this body of work has become increasingly coherent, and I feel that these aerial landscapes and coastal paintings represent some of the strongest work I have produced.
Moving earlier pieces to Art 4 Homes allowed me to see this more clearly and to give the newer work the focus it deserved.
Sometimes a change in direction does not happen all at once. It emerges gradually, almost without noticing, until eventually the pieces begin to fit together.
Looking back now, I can see that the journey from large canvases and more abstract work to these aerial landscapes was not a departure at all, but a natural evolution.