My work is about sky. Most people enjoy a beautiful sunset and those that rise early enough, a beautiful dawn. Clouds are much maligned bringers of unpleasant weather, but rain is a necessary part of the ecosystem and the clouds that bring them can be a beautiful composition of art. In fact, the sky is where we live – we just live there at ground level. It is the most important part of our world, the most changing, the instigator of most physical changes. And the weather is always in the news coverage. My capture of the skies and abstractions thereof aim to help us realize how small we are in the face of the sky, and yet how it unites us all.

I call my signature method “refracturing”. I stole the term from quilters, but had it recognized by the international collage magazine “Kolaj” in 2016 as the word for this method. It involves painting each scene one or more times, then cutting and reassembling. I like to juxtapose pieces that have a partially matched edge which gives an interesting mix of flow and clash. Stylistically the method has been described as “somewhere between third generation orphism (an offshoot of cubism) and unclassifiable” – which is a great place to be unless you’re trying to explain it to a gallerist over the phone. It’s also probably impossible to liken it to anyone else’s work as I believe no one else is working this way at the moment.

When we look at something, we don’t look at it in its entirety all at once, but focus on this bit, that bit, this bit over here…. so, my method presents the art in the way that the observer would process them. Writing poetry for the work and painting it in, is not only one of the ways I have found of combining that other half of my creativity but also a guide to the emotion, the soul, of the particular painting.