I’ve always looked at the landscape and imagined how it once was. It’s a kind of longing, almost a melancholia about how things could still have been. Much of my work is done en plein air, and I slip easily into reverie, which reliably transports me anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of years back in time.
Distilling the complexity of the landscape is key to my work, and this reducing of the world to its essential elements works in harmony with my reveries of the past, since memory, or even just imagination, is itself a form of refining a place and time into a simplified vision. It’s almost a visual euphemism, a selective savouring of only the best parts of a time that may not have been as perfect as we remember.