“To the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself” William Blake
For me, the starting points are my photographs of natural places. Over these I work pigments, earths and acrylic wash – tipping and tilting the surface of the canvas and using big brushes and mops to move the paint around. I watch and partially control the bloomings of colour, sedimentations of sand and tide lines that dry at the edge of pools.
I don’t ‘paint’ so much as facilitate the natural alchemy and movement of the materials as they interact with each other. I like to combine the technological rendering of nature as it appears in photographs, the facilitation of the nature in the materials and my own nature in the looking and doing. At some point this can all be integrated and with an act of imagination, a new image emerges.
Is imagination nature?