My current work is landscape painting. My paintings are born through watercolour, pencil and ink drawings and occasionally photography plays a part in the development process. Memory and recollection of feelings and thoughts have given depth and maturity to my recent works. This has allowed me to represent how the landscape makes me feel rather than just representing how it looks.

I have made works that are loosely painted but still show the landscape in a representational manner. I have also stepped out of my comfort zone and made non-representational paintings that deal with the theory of phenomenology of perception. This being, me detaching my paintings from knowledge and learning and representing what I feel and am conscious of, rather that what I know and see. There are also paintings I have made this term that fit into a transitional juncture. These particular paintings portray a great deal of my thoughts on the way landscape painting is heading in the contemporary art world. The drips of paint that

run down the representational landscape not only show the failing veil of weather that runs down ones face and engulfs the landscape. But the drips are simultaneously acting a shield, which hides the embarrassment of painting a picturesque landscape. Despite appearances there is one theme that ties all of my landscape paintings together: the weather. Whether it is through alluring colour and seductive surface or paint acting as rain weather and the elements is present and dominant within all my work.

Howard Hodgkin, Gerhard Richter and Callum Innes are artists that have been influential on my recent work. Callum Innes has a link with technique, his use of colour and sensitive surface are things that reflect in my work. The other artists are relevant to me because of their thought process associated with their landscape paintings. The artists are making landscape works that are so far from representation there are flirting with

the

borders of abstraction, however as long as the paintings still hold devices such as titles and exploring consciousness, they wont cross the very subtle border into abstraction.

I have found my non-representational landscapes extremely rewarding to make and revel in; I have found solace within them. I have realised what a landscape painting can be and how much information a non-representational painting can give they can truly evoke the emotions felt while amidst the landscape. My aim now is to push these paintings as far as they can while still being thought of as landscape by both my audience and me.