Painting place; or more specifically, painting manmade structures in a landscape, is where it all began for me. The idea of a building being erected in a place, existing there, belonging there, having purpose there, and eventually decaying there – or more abruptly, being demolished – seemed like a metaphor to me for our own questions about life, existence and belonging.
Around the time I moved to Denmark, there was a hiatus where I retreated inward and began exploring the inner landscape through more abstract means. I started painting place again after the birth of my first child. It is an occasional and a slow process, perhaps not the core of my practice but an important part of it, since I think of it as relating to both inner and outer landscapes, and increasingly as a form of exploration of man’s influence over his environment and vice versa.
Note: the image behind this text is a photograph of the remains of the former Middlesex Hospital in London, taken while I was working at BBC Broadcasting House in 2008. It is where my father studied as a clinical medical student; he may even have trodden this floor, but at the point I took the picture, the hospital had been demolished and the site was awaiting development. One part of the original building remains, the former hospital chapel, a little gem that is now called the Fitzrovia Chapel.