to paint is to revel in the dance and drama of colour…

Colour, choreographed into a play of pleasure, to evoke the overwhelmingly intense joy and sensuality at the heart of nature and life. Colour is rejected by some as infantile, vulgar, oriental, narcotic, feminine, superficial, cosmetic but I love all these qualities and above all I find colour richly sensuous, intoxicating and mysterious. Somewhere, over the rainbow, colour is a regained innocence, a liberty, a ravishing delight, subversive and passionate. As it spreads, flows, bleeds, stains, floods, soaks, seeps and merges, it echoes nature. Colour is a way of describing and celebrating the moment, here, now and grappling with the serious business of the pursuit of joy which our natural world can spark and fire in us.

of the imperfect and primitive
beauty of the

earth…

oil on canvas 90 x 130 cms

bowl by jean-nicholas gerard…

it gives us the earth…

the earth…

oil on canvas 90 x 130 cms

Into the tiny chapel at Vence, Matisse poured an encyclopaedia of global art. What sustained Matisse was his conviction that people shared the same universal message. What the Matisse chapel delivers is the instinctive sense that redemption and the pleasure of the senses belong together; the idea that you got salvation from happiness. He thought ultimately that’s what art had to deliver and what we need now.”

Simon Schama

Civilisation

portrait of the

furrows…

oil on canvas 90 x 120 cms

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t be making yourself happy. Enjoying yourself. Feasting on beauty. I want an art that’s going to make me feel heady, in a high flown way. I love the idea. I’d use the word spiritual. I’m not frightened of all that. I want paintings to be uplifting.”

Gillian Ayres.