A Quiet Language Of Flowers

If you are familiar with my work, it will be no surprise to you that painting for me is  a kind of non-verbal language. A language made through mark-making, searching brushstrokes, layered colour harmonies that carry feeling, and those subtle tonal shifts that can quietly hold emotion.

In these recent floral paintings I find myself drawn to what might be described as a post-romantic sensibility, an atmosphere where emotion is present, but quiet. The flowers offer a way to explore tenderness, vulnerability and impermanence without needing to say it outright.

Through intuitive mark-making and shifting harmonies of colour, the paintings evolve slowly, almost like a form of visual improvisation. Feeling begins to surface through the material of paint itself. The marks are largely intuitive. I tend to work in an add-and-subtract way, building, scraping back, adjusting, often discovering unexpected marks along the way that surprise me.

The flowers are really just the starting point. A humble subject. Often it is wild fennel growing along the roadside, pushed into a vase.  My approach  sits somewhere between observation and memory.

Rather than illustrating the flowers, I’m interested in allowing the painting to unfold. In this way the work becomes a space to explore those quiet states of feeling, places where the spoken word doesn’t quite reach.

56cmx56cm

Oil on linen