'This exhibition of paintings stems from my love of studying plants and flowers, my love of growing them as well as observing them, and from the joy it gives me to be surrounded by them. My hope is that incidentally, if not deliberately, that glorious feeling will come across to others who share my passion. There is elegance, beauty, movement and life in the plants that are all around us, from humble 'weed' to hot-house bloom, and they form, sometimes, the focus of my paintings, and sometimes they are simply incidental in a composition - ever present and closely observed.
Quite simply, they intrigue and they delight me.
In some of my paintings, the close study of a particular plant can be seen in all the stages of its development, from tiny green bud, to a bud that shows the promise of colour and of character, from which unfurling petals give way to burgeoning full-blown beauty, colours then beginning to change, and eventually to fade, petals losing their vitality and collapsing, seed pods forming, and the cycle being completed.
In some plants, like the delphinium, you can see all of these developments happening simultaneously as the flowering cycle evolves.
Once I am familiar with a particular plant, I find myself using it in slightly more abstracted ways, as you will see in the paintings of barley fields, for example, where the seed heads begin to form patterns, and I am able to begin to suggest the movement of the air, the breeze, the wind, riffling through the grasses. Then, these plants become what makes up the landscape before me.
Sometimes, too, I will use the plants to form a broken screen through which something half-hidden may be glimpsed.