BARNSCAPES, and a series of landscape orientated works made over the last couple of years...

These three 4x4 feet paintings were composed from photographs I took on my arrival in Pennsylvania back in early August 2006. They use both a limited palette and media, the aim being not only to express the saturation of light in the landscape I was experiencing but also attempting to convey atmosphere with limited means.

The appearance they have of large scale watercolours and expanse of sky pay homage to JMW Turner however the introduction of aerosol sprays and stenciling is very much a reference to to my own urban memories of childhood.

One of the intentions of this new work is to journey back to childhood memories, the first experience of warm sunlight which was an emotional uplift in an otherwise harsh industrial blue collar environment....light and sensitivity hold hand in hand.

• This was an earlier expressive sky in Otley,UK where expression and gesture are more important than colour harmony or painterly discipline.
  An earlier breakage of sky and loosening of figuration, the face is that of a Man Ray muse.
  A softening of both subject matter and media, the purples and orange distant field owe as much to the Fauves as anything else.....what Franz Marc could have given us?
  A small 5x7in. drypoint of Stoodle Pike monument high on the hills of northern England...the dark satanic mills of the 'Lancashire Lament' standing firm against the elements. This a celebration to the great outdoors,the long tradition of fell-running and
  strength of the individual against adversity.

Above we have a 4x4 feet colour study of a ficticious landscape, a barren narrow sand strip and expanse of sky broken by a surreal rocky mountain range....this was an exercise in colour as much as anything else. One of the constant elements in work of this period(I did about eight of these in a week !) was the geometric simplification of landscape, horizon tensions and basic coluor wheel harmony....a kind of illustration you could use in school to help complimentary and local colour understanding, from my own creative point of view it was a nice place to visit on a wet yorkshire evening !
When I first moved into Chevin Hall in Otley ,Yorkshire five years ago I went on a run from the house on trails to Ilkley Moor....I seemed to have time to take photographs at neary every stile/gate I came to (jogging back then and relegated to the Fell-running ranks of the Pudsey & Bramley A.C. 'B' team !). I made a series of oil pastel studies from these photographs but this was the only painting I produced at that time and it is in this collection as a reminder of the rich and varied subject matter I have waiting for me on my return to the Yorkshire Landscape.....I can already picture my studio full of grand-scale oil paintings of such subjects as Malham Cove and the limestone landscapes of Kettlewell and beyond.
As a child I was brought up in a house close to the centre of the urban city of Leeds, there have been dramatic changes to the architecture and culture of Leeds over the last twenty years or so and this large-scale reduction linoprint in it's angular and heavily exagerated tonal form aimed to convey the modernity of the 'New Look Leeds'......if you were to venture down to that 'kneck of the woods' opposite the Royal Armouries Museum over Crown Point Bridge you would find a lone robust Yorkshire Rose carved out of a one ton block of limestone on the spot where I carved my first plaster carving .......as a teenager sitting in the sunny garden of Chadwick Lodge.
This is just one of the Wharfdale Skies series I did back in 2005, the playfulness of shapes and simplification of farmlands is an approach I keep visiting with the work I am doing here in the U.S. the over reliance on black lines is evident here.....I would hope the strength and conviction of line communicates a sense of empowerment in the viewer more than an excuse for weak observation on my part but I'll not be the judge of that.
Above is an abstraction from the stone steps that run up the Chevin , near Otley, Yorkshire.
Here is a quick oil pastel study of a dry-stone wall found somewhere in the Engligh countryside, the introduction of the meandering coloured lines and their adjacent shadows executed in this rustic muddy media remind me of some of the work I produced while studying at Leeds College of Art on my Foundation Art course...an American artist called Matta was influencing me at that time I do recall.
The second 'Sleeping Muse'(4x8 feet oil on board) ,after one of the early photoworks of Man Ray symbolizes the wet rain-drenched rural landscape of Yorkshire as a resting place, a refuge and a setting where you can quietly contemplate and reflect.
This is a view from the top of MalhamCove in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park...sky, land, and rock.
The open spaces and natural elements you often experience in the 'Great Outdoors' is reflected in this 6x8feet canvas. I did a series of three large canvases likes this in five hours back in the summer of 2005 at the end of the school year.....I should have come to the States then as they now have all been painted over ....but not to worry I could do them all again tomorrow in three hours if I needed to !....There is always the possibility of getting the images back again in the future through lazer technology, they are now under the 'Grand Abstracts' series I made in July 2006 !

BARNSCAPES.......

This one of my earlier 'barnscapes' inspired by the atmospheric detail of a Pennsylvanian farm. The exagerated lighting and menace of the cloud and sky formations allow me to express presence and feeling within an empty setting. The painting allows you to enter an environment both isolated and forboding but at the same time offers an appreciation of the symbolism held within the simple form of a wooden barn.
I pay homage to lighting often seen in paintings of Edward Hopper from the American Landscape tradition aswell as the religious connotations made with lighting of an El Greco master, it would be impossible to portray such a subject from the 'eyes of an outsider' without such a lyrical association.
The painting was made in oils on canvas and measures 4x4 feet, the frame of which was made by hand and with fence poles ,this again pays a homage to the strong industrious agricultural wortk ethic that I now witness living here in Lancaster County. The painting was painted in a day and was completed at 3.30am so it is not suprising that if I was receptive during it's execution that elements of loneliness and quiet reflective melancholia are important factors in the work.
The light and the celebration of the archetye are the most important reasons behind the work and as I now find myself as a creative living artist observing a completly different environment and culture with afresh conviction and enthusiasm for capturing the landscape around me.