I want to honour the things I’m painting. They absorb me and, however mundane they may seem, I want to give them an opportunity to speak and be valued – to re-present them. Most things have some sort of personal resonance or connotation. Like smell or sound, they’ll evoke different feelings and memories in each of us.
Painting my local fenland landscape has influenced my still life – it’s flat and unpretentious with everything laid out in front of you. The objects that I paint are ordinary everyday things. Painting them close up and often in multiples, is a way of concentrating directly on them with no distraction – a way of forcing observation as if they were in a museum.
My working method is not immediate – there’s a lot of planning. I use a restricted palette and work on a painting as a whole, gradually building up tone and colour and moving from large washes to more detailed structure until I achieve the sculptural quality that I want.