London Light no 1
The first in a projected series to try and capture the ever changing light of the city and its great river.

Night and the River, Nocturne Hammersmith
This was inspired by the Thames at Hammersmith and is in part also a tribute to the composer Gustav Holst who lived and worked there. He wrote the mystical Planets Suite nearby.

Sunset Over Skye
One of the great sights of Western Scotland, the ever changing light over the Island of Skye. I spent a week looking across from the mainland and it never failed to inspire and mystify.

Dark Morning
An autumn storm approaching. I love the clouds gathering and the sense of foreboding that creates. An enveloping horizon is a common theme in my work.

The River and the Moon
Initially inspired by the music of Sibelius, this piece evolved on themes of the tidal power of the moon and the atmosphere of the river bank in moonlight.

Thames Nocturne, Westminster Bridge
From the London Light series
A view of the river towards Westminster, evening light flooding the river, the dark city emerging from the sunset. Influenced in part by Whistler.

Ocean Sunrise
A trip to the gulf of Oman inspired this abstract and the extraordinary powerful sunrise in this part of the world.

Indian Summer
A welcome late summer and its warm light, helped me paint this.

Early One Morning I love first light and the revelation of the landscape by outline and suggestion.

City Stars
It is always wonderful when we can see the stars, living in a city. Those nights are special to me.

Sundown Redshift Light reaching us from a distant sun, originally inspired by the redshift effect.

Winter Fields no 3 Kent country side in winter, from a series

Night Wave an atmospheric piece as is November Sun

Dancer, 2007 Acrylic on canvas
Dancer : Ramona, Music by Bach, Chaconne from solo violin partita.

Dance Transitions 2008 Acrylic on canvas
Dancer : Ramona, Music by Arvo Part and Sigur Ros

Dance Drawings
Recent studies of dancers in various media on paper

Russian Dancer, Acrylic on canvas


Large Dancer Series
These large canvases are studies of dance, movement or gesture. Inspired by contemporary and classical dancers, music, photography and sculpture. I work with the dancer in life size compositions in which we enter as viewers to move around in a virtual three dimensional space. Originally Inspired by Matisse and Degas, I became aware of my own need to animate the canvas and retain a sculptural quality. The paintings are worked up in layers of observed movement, trying to express the essence of the movement and the dancer. Very little is obscured, so that the progress of the painter and the dancer can be observed. They are painted from life, using the inspiration and styles of individual contemporary and classical dancers .These abstracted and complex figure paintings aim to celebrate the body and express movement of the human figure in its purist form.

A dancer once told me that the nearest she could get to describing the act of dancing was as if the air itself was solid and she moved into that space to cut through it and own it in her own way. I similarly use the space of the canvas as that solid air and try to give the viewer a sense of how a particular body moved within and occupied a particular space. From Degas through Rodin to Matisse and Pollock the dancer in art has influenced my painting, in Pollock's case the artist himself became the dancer and that quicksilver approach to nuance of movement is one that I adopt, by working very quickly in real-time. The paintings and drawings, which precede them, are always works in progress, records of that spontaneity of expression. The brush becomes an extension of the body, a dancers limb, a fleeting moment captured but hopefully revealing of something that endures of the human form, forever in motion.

“Dance takes abstraction further. It has no physical form. It comes from what the dancers do…… it has no objective reality. Its reality is virtual not physical”
Candida Smith

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul” Martha Graham

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