Full Artist Statement
I am drawn to places that make you feel small. Ridgelines that disappear into cloud. Valleys that hold silence. The particular loneliness of a mountain hut seen from far away, its single lit window a signal in the dark. These are the images that stay with me, and painting is my way of staying with them a little longer.
My medium is oil — specifically oil on canvas or board, in scales that range from a small study you can hold in two hands to a canvas that asks you to stand back. I chose oil because of its slowness. It resists impatience. You cannot hurry a glaze. You must wait, and in waiting you look harder at what you are trying to say.
The subjects I return to most often are mountains — the Scottish Highlands, the Alps, the Canadian Rockies — and the particular quality of northern light on those landscapes. Light after rain. Light on snow. The last few minutes of amber before the colour drains out entirely. There is something in the transience of that light that I find endlessly compelling: it reminds you that you are looking at something that will not last, and so you look more carefully.
A painting is not a record of what was there. It is a record of how it felt to be there.
I also paint wildlife — cranes, highland cattle, deer — because wild animals occupy landscape differently from us. They move through it without self-consciousness. Watching an animal in its environment is like watching a landscape breathe. These paintings tend to be quieter than my mountain work, more intimate in scale, and I find in them a different kind of attention.
My process begins outside. I photograph, sketch, make colour notes in a small notebook. I am not plein air in the classical sense — the light moves too fast and I am too slow — but I need that direct contact with a place to ground what I make back in the studio. Memory is not reliable, but it is selective in interesting ways. It keeps what mattered and discards the rest. I try to paint from that edited version of experience.
In the studio, I work in layers — transparent glazes to build colour depth, opaque passages for light. A painting can sit for days while I wait for a layer to dry, then return with fresh eyes and a different brush. The surface of an oil painting is a record of time, and I want that time to be visible. I want you to be able to see the painting was made by a hand, not a machine.
I began painting in 2020, in the enforced stillness of lockdown, when I could not go to the mountains and so started painting them instead. It was an act of longing, and it remains one. Each canvas is a version of somewhere I want to be.