Being someone who creates is a funny old thing. You are in the privileged position of viewing everything with an eye to potential. A flower found on a family walk has the potential to be the jumping off point for a colour scheme or a chat with a stranger about the weather of a stormy sky. I would go as far as to say in my case, nothing is safe from my inclination to take the most mundane of ideas, push them onto the canvas and into my strange little world. One theme that is often the subject of this inclination is space. Whilst I wouldn’t put it into the category of the mundane, I would dare to suggest that on an ordinary day, amongst the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, we sometimes fail to recognise that we are in fact suckered aboard a rock by the forces of gravity, hurtling at around 1700 km/hr through the solar system. The moment we stop to consider this fact is the moment you really get to wondering who we really are and what this is all about.
One of the gifts of a subject like space is not just its vastness but its mystery. There is so much we can say we know, but so much we cannot. Therefore it lends itself to the strangeness in a mind such as mine as to how far we can push our imagination. When I paint it feels like my job is to take the viewer out of the place they are standing and into the wonder of another world. Although didn’t I earlier refer to the fact that we are already there, already floating through this otherworldliness we call space. It’s just we never give our minds the chance to notice, so maybe that is what I’m really doing when I bring another painting into the field for all to see. Maybe I’m hoping that I have created something that gives pause for thought and an excuse to look up at the sky and notice.
