“The painter goes through the land and sees what nobody else has seen because landscape painting comes from inside not out”
Christopher Neve – Unquiet Landscape
My works explore the integral connection between place and the human condition; in particular the scarring and subsequent healing of the landscape reflecting personal experiences.
I have read T.S Eliot’s swansong Four Quartets many times during my adult life, I have to confess that I still don’t fully understand it all and probably never will. I have phrases from the works that resonate with me, and despite being baffled, I keep being called back to them.
Eliot questioned the human experience, the human construct of time, our search for purpose and the fragility of life. In his second poem East Coker he speaks of the cycle of birth and death.
“Love is most nearly itself, When here and now cease to matter”
My understanding of this is that there is something beyond here and now that we need to connect with. The connection that I have to the thin places on Dartmoor, how I feel when visiting and making images, is the closest I can get to explaining my own work. I find it extremely difficult to articulate in words how I feel when responding to place, it is an ancient, deep gut response that we no longer seem to understand.
Image: Marking Time