During lockdown I have returned to painting Landscape. I have always found the landscape on the islands of the west coats of Scotland deeply inspiring and it was whilst I was working as a community arts worker on the Isle of Mull in 1988 that I first started painting. Many of my splashy landscapes painted with poster paint and rags (as this was all we had in the remote row of fishermen’s cottages @ Camus where I was working) formed the basis of the portfolio that got me into art collage, as a 24 yr old Literature graduate with no qualifications in art. 3 years later I graduated with a first class degree in Drawing and Painting and the rest is history, as they say.
After a 28 year journey through abstraction, mixed media, drawing, prints, artist books and some short films, for 10 years of which the use of the new technology of laser cutting and engraving was in the forefront of my practice, I am delighted to have come full circle during lockdown and returned to my first love: painting west coast landscapes, currently inspired my the beautiful, majestic landscape on the Isle of Lewis, which I visited for the first time in July this year and instantly fell in love with.
It has been years since I looked around me and had an uncontrollable urge to paint the landscape in front of me and I am currently enjoying really using sketchbooks for the first time, to gather information in preparation for painting: an approach I didn’t really take at Art College. I look forward to sharing my new work in the new year.