I want to tell you a story of long distance walking, of wind and weather, mud and mountains. It's a story set hundreds of years ago, but I need to be able to tell you it without words. It involves determination, trust, animals.. lots of them and some very hardy men who made the countryside how we see it today. These are some of the ways I'm exploring...
So I walk their walk, just a little bit each day, and collect what I found on the pathways. I take objects, natural or manmade and keep them, adding them to paintings made of the landscape in which they were found. The ancient tracks and what is there today. How much has the view changed... I suspect in a lot of cases around here it is still recognisable, defined by the contours of the hills and stretches of moorland between.
There are tangles of dead grasses and moss, in this case the scale of the small handful looks like trees in the landscape, I like the effect of scale on the painting while playing with something more representational in a more abstract landscape. A single strand of dead grass becomes tree like in the mists, stories in the landscape.
But, why the bright colours? Well... that's another strand to the story telling...