A fascination with the fleetingness of time drives me to paint. Every day I obsessively take photographs to preserve a moment, and I paint these moments to express my own inner world. The landscape becomes a metaphor for the human experience. My every day emotions and the way they manifest and change become the essence of the work. I am interested in the way nature become a pathetic fallacy - a lone tree, a stormy sky, a dead tree without leaves. Landscape becomes a metaphor for life, of its fragility and emotion, the ever-changing emotions and the human condition in all its complexity. The seasons are a reflection of this change and I find that baron landscapes signify the emptiness and also wonder of our existence. My works become reflective of my moods, often unconsciously. As I witness and obsessively photograph the elements around me - the sun, moon, clouds, often through train windows or on walks and in every day moments, they become reference images for drawings or paintings.
In the studio I work intuitively with colour, letting movement and emotion override the need to paint a place or moment directly as it looks. I try to depict a feeling; not only how I feel, but universally in nature, an interconnected web of every living thing. This all comes from a need to document a fleeting moment in nature and the seasons where each cloud pattern, tree, or moment in time is unique and cannot be replicated. I am driven by all of the patterns in nature that feel intentional and all of the moments that I have seen and photographed that make me believe in more and make me stop and think about time and existence. By connecting to this part of myself, I feel I am connected to so much more than just myself. The feeling of being alive and the certainty of death are integral to my painting because I am driven by the passing of time - a cloud shape that appears and then disappears within mere minutes.
