Irrespective of one’s spiritual beliefs or understanding of history, these milestones can be seen as narratives with universal resonance of caution, courage and hopefully redemption.
They are great stories.
And so it is with art. Artists tell stories.
Those familiar with my work, know that I am most interested in the eroticised figure, the voyeur and dismantling taboos.
Mine is an interior world, a kind of inside diaristic view which manifests publicly in painterly terms.
Radical restrictions imposed in lockdown shifted my relationship to inside/outside. Nature and the outside world which I had taken for granted as a given, disappeared in a mist of fear and anxiety with the pandemic.
Daily rituals changed.
I started to look at skies and landscapes as never before.
My awareness of mortality and fragility, hightened by the grandeur of the natural world around me, resonated with personal ideas of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. In real terms for an artist, these are difficult themes to address, almost taboo. In a sense, our spiritual belief systems are so vast and varied that thematically they can only be alluded to from a distance, if at all.