So this is the first post on this blog... The beginning of a new venture and new experiences. Hopefully people will like what they see on the site and get in touch. Anyway my plan is to keep painting, drawing etc, and to keep thoughts and ideas going right here, so, who knows - maybe it'll be worth reading?

Painting, drawing, all that looking; watching, seeing how the world worlds and then trying to understand how I see it. I guess everyone goes through this stuff, but for me it's about what I'm looking to do, and I think it's beginning to make sense. The drawing - the detail of the seeing - engaging with the subject (or object) as it is, is meditation or contemplation. It is me trying to understand a relationship with what I see. The painting is the process of making sense of the world, of interpreting it, and thinking about how I perceive it. This may sound a little wrapped up in myself (or bleeding obvious), but today I was sketching a ancient burial cairn, and I realised that the space had a relationship to those people before it became a place of rest, and my act of sketching was about how I related to the landscape around me. That sketch is detailed, intricate, trying to be precise; however in thinking of the sketch as a painting I will translate that detail through the prism of emotion, feeling and general resistance to the world - where that will take me, as yet I don't know... but finding out will be fun.