Originally inspired by looking through books of aerial landscape photographs and seeing the same forms repeated in smaller objects, from the veins on a leaf to the patterns in rock exposed by the sea, most drawings begin as an enlarged section of a photograph, which I enlarge still further using a grid and layout paper. My most recent drawings are taken from small sections of bark on silver birch trees but the inspiration for the composition of the images comes from the Chinese landscape paintings of the Ming and Qing dynasties, more specifically those paintings belonging to the ‘watching waterfalls’ theme.
The blatant use of the grid to construct the image is significant, advertising the inherent and unavoidable flatness of the media; grids similar to these have long been used by artists to produce believable images but would generally have been hidden beneath layers of paint. The grid also allows me to give equal value to every part of the image; each tiny square represents a similar amount of input, inviting the viewer to fully consider the relevance of every unit.
The price range for my work is between £100 and £500.
