The disciplines of painting, sculpture and drawing are timeless ways of making images. Each seems to me to be clearly defined within its own parameters and at the same time belong intimately to the other two.
My studio and workshop are separate spaces for practical reasons though I always have completed sculptures or parts of sculptures in the painting studio. This makes for a continuing dialogue between the two. Subject grows out of this, its content and the resulting forms born out of experience and memory are in the dialogue. Certain structures and qualities of surface have become significant, surfaces especially seem to register with the emotions, to open up and recall our sense of touch down the ages - echoes along the ebb and flow of tides, of the physical world, there, locked into our being - a memory of this in the paint…
Drawing however has become an almost separate activity for me, but has always been the engine room that drives everything. I work mainly in drawing books - approx. A4 size - and have done so now for thirty years. The book travels with me, so, unlike painting and sculpture which are grounded in the studio, the world becomes my studio. I draw anywhere at any time across a vast range of subjects - these vary from carefully observed naturalistic studies, to incidental marks and imaginings, always made as expressions in their own right and never regarded as a preparation for something else. Drawing is that which measures touch against the living pulse - a simple expressive act which is there in childhood at the beginning, connecting us to the world with an inquisitive directness and a mediating force I still feel.
These three - painting, sculpture and drawing - have become my daily round of work. In between I walk by the sea on a regular basis to ventilate the various genes and molecules that hold me together and to scan the horizon where I find the edge of my restless longing.
