I’m an oil painter interested in capturing [non] hierarchies and push and pull forces within landscapes. I’m keen to draw out such relationships between trees, shrubs and flowers and the man-made, particularly aged structures such as old stone walls and ornate ironwork, taking heavy inspiration from the aesthetics of the world heritage city in which I’ve lived all my life.​

 

Inspired by photographer Thomas Struth’s affinity for working in series, I expand traditional properties of landscape paintings, where the viewer’s eye can explore depth and distance, and play variedly with it across my landscapes; based on photographs I take on my phone in the moments of my encounters with my subjects, I paint them at the exact angles in which I took them to experiment with focal and vantage points, depth and flatness, seeing how their differences affect people’s emotional and contemplative responses. 

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I aim for my ongoing series to act as a playful tool for audiences to follow along with my own everyday happenings; by working on smaller scales and purposefully omitting place-specificities, my paintings are curious and intimate celebrations of serendipity: the discovery of something happy or beneficial by chance. In this vein, inspired by landscape painter Sue Wales and the Impressionist movement, I heavily accentuate the colour, saturation and light of each encounter, emphasising their annual season and atmosphere as integral components of the unique transience of each situation. Being attentive to my brushwork, I try to differentiate the characteristics of each subject, particularly of various shrub species, to properly exemplify the locations my paintings are based on. Through balancing mark-making looseness with control, and playing with bright underpaintings, I explore how the physicality of my paintings can enhance their subject matter and impression on a viewer. ​​