While exploring the wilderness I paint I hike, scramble, bushwhack, get rained on, sometimes burnt and almost always eaten alive by bugs, all while trying to get to the places that call to me. Some of these places are beside lonely, sometimes forgotten roads or trails, others are so far away from signs of people that it is easy to forget that people exist. My paintings are of these special places and the stories they have to share.
Working primarily in watercolour and oil, my landscapes are based on photographs and plein air pieces I have done on location. Recently I have been exploring the idea that landscape and our recollections of it are not one thing but are instead a collection of small, sometimes seemingly insignificant, things. When put together they tell a candid story of an intimate moment in time shared between the wild and ourselves.
Some of the landscapes are impressions of a single moment. Others are visual montages of the landscape and more reflective of our feelings and connections to a place than the actual place itself. Not all the moments painted are perfect or pretty, yet they are intentional and exist somewhere between fiction and reality, like a shared memory between old friends.
• I mix my own blacks, greys, greens… really all my colours and use a basic primary colour selection to do so.
• My worst experience with bugs was in the arctic in early summer. The noise they made on my gortex sounded like hail and the air was thick with them. It was unreal.
• When working in watercolour if there is white in my painting I use the colour of the paper or canvas instead of white paint.
• I am terrified of bears and cougars… even more so of moose. THEY ARE HUGE and UNPREDICTABLE!!!
• I have had the same watercolour pallet since 1998, I love it.
