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What is my work about?

My artwork is about the world I glimpse in my everyday life. It expresses how as part of nature I respond to the effects of human activity on our environment. What I paint from these observations is not 'the sublime' or sensational, bt rather quite small things within my reach. Thus, the resilience of plants, especially trees, contrast with the ephemeral nature of human activity in this era of climate crisis and pandemics. I see the beauty in the organic response to destructive events.

Artists who relate to their immediate localities are mportant influences for me. Often they work near where I do. I particularly relate to Victoria Crowe, Peter Doig and Andrew Mackenzie in terms of my subjects. Like them I work in different locations, sometimes from memory, in urgan green spaces in the city of Edinburgh, further afield in the Scottish borders and a sparsely populated hillside on the shores of Loch Broom in the Highlands. My sources for images of the juxtaposition of plants tend to be what I see every day in these different settings.

Encouraged by the work of David Hockney, I work with iPad Brishes, sometimes mixing it with charcoal, waterclour and acrylic paint in iteration with the iPad. Working between the digital and the analogue helps me to express feelings of surface, light and texture. These paintings can be resized and replicated, so defying traditional ideas of scale and lighting, emanating rather than simply reflecting light when seen on digital platforms. They also have the capacity to challenge the commoditisation of art.