STATEMENT
My paintings and drawings are layered legacies: visual traces of my accumulated experience of the diverse landscapes of Crete. They are responses to living and working 'elsewhere', on a Greek island, for extended periods of time over many years.
Images have their origins in rural and urban settings, in places glimpsed and remembered, explored and recorded, savoured and revisited. My work is informed by long-standing preoccupations with the dramatic qualities of expansive mountain vistas, the intimacy of enclosed courtyard gardens and the faded patina and crumbling architectural detail of abandoned stone buildings. Over time, a kind of 'seepage' occurs; residual elements of earlier work 'surface' in later work with the unanticipated persistence of re emergent stains on an absorbent, damp ceiling. Rather like the capacity of Crete itself to maintain a strong individual identity having absorbed numerous foreign influences throughout a turbulent history.
In recent years my work has been informed by a lot of looking at the remnants of Byzantine and Venetian stone walls, fragments of fortifications that punctuate the perimeter of the old city of Chania. These stratified structures expose embedded fragments of preserved precision, inventive interventions of recycled components that hint at former functions and now surrounded by decay and disintegration. These walls are a rich source of imagery: sites where order and disorder, the enduring and ephemeral, the robust and fragile coexist, within and between the layers. They stand as a metaphor for our capacity to change whilst remaining who we are.
Distanced from Crete and confined by imposed lockdowns in London during the Covid pandemic, I produced a series of paintings based on my memories of harbours and horizons in 'the warm south.' As personal horizons contracted, lines of demarcation dissolved and the sheltering and shielding functions of harbours acquired new meanings through the process of painting.
Between 2022 and 2024 I recorded different phases of the “redevelopment” of the municipal market in Chania: the Agora. My latest paintings and drawings reflect my experience of the deconstruction and reconstruction of this historic landmark. More widely I see my Agora project as a celebration of the mysterious allure and often melancholic beauty of abandoned spaces, demolition sites, dilapidated and derelict buildings: reminders of the transience of life.
Whilst the focus of my attention has shifted over the years the attraction of the landscapes of Crete and a fascination with the coexistence of deliberation and chance, order and disorder, remain constant: the umbilical cord that links earlier and later work.
Summer 2024