As a landscape painter I am always inspired by the beauty and forms of nature, but it is only I the last few years that I have developed a way to incorporate elements of the landscape within the canvas. Every day I walk across the fields and through the wood picking up natural materials and photographing the countryside as I go. I love the shapes and colours of the trees, grasses and leaves that create the landscape. Then the challenge is to take the natural materials and breathe new life into them, capturing the structural and textural elements and drawing them out with paint and medium.
I love the tactile, building up of texture and detail that brings the dead foliage back to life with a new beauty and purpose. These humble grasses and natural materials are dried and pressed before being immortalised within a hardening material so that they are embedded within the canvas in a layering process, built up with paint and metallic mica powders. My art practice is environmentally conscious with water-based environmentally friendly materials as I hope to illustrate the beauty of the landscape and what we have to lose by destroying it.
