Paintings
Encouraged greatly by my mother I always drew and painted. No trip on a London train, zoo visit or café cuppa would have been complete without a tattered sketchbook, bag of pencils and clutch of felt pens. I did veer off on tangents later - photography and film at art college, years working as a London stylist, doing up houses, and earning generally - but the drawing and painting thing has always been with me.
My notebooks, often recording train journeys, are pivotal for my work. Timed sketches of two minutes are the foundation for each painting, the by-hazard loops and marks offering suggestion of new forms and textures in the emerging picture.
Time and place are the key elements, the fleeting moments captured within those two minutes; the particular journey or place, memories revealed as I rework the chosen sketch onto its canvas or wood support, colour added, new memories forming of the current day. As a Londoner, re-visiting half-forgotten haunts in the capital, places transformed by the passage of time, evoke deeper memories.
I have felt increasingly uncomfortable about the environmental implications of using acrylic paint in plastic tubes to be then brushed onto bought wooden surfaces, so have sought out an alternative. My work is now drawn and painted onto pre-used canvasses and wood panels, the paint and brushes also second-hand, discarded by other painters.
Using found supports to work on is an added fascinating element in itself; often the traces of someone else's brushwork still visible within those of my own, a half revealed signature, a tree or building's outline visible under my own marks. That person's time. My fleeting two minutes sketch. My time. Time held in one painting.