It has been quite a journey

A journey discovering the joys of painting with light.

To capture the elusive and varied qualities of light to convey mood, atmosphere, emotion and understanding; now there's a perpetual challenge.

An artist who has achieved this, and whom I have always been inspired by, is Rembrandt. His paintings are rich, with deep space, emotively loaded pigment, and the drama of selective lighting.

In my first representative paintings of Santorini and Istanbul, with their full colour palette, I was using light to convey the atmosphere of these two very different places - calm versus clamour, simplicity versus grandeur, earthiness versus opulence.

In the Doorways and Transition series, with a limited palette, I moved from depicting atmosphere to using light to convey ephemeral moments, moments which evoke our deepest emotions - looking outwards towards the light as a metaphor for change and hope.

Now with my latest paintings, there are figures, people who have entered my work as a result of the paintings of entrances and thresholds, echoes of some distant past. These richly coloured figures dispel darkness, glow in their own right, and form their own sense of atmosphere

Painting intuitively and allowing each figure to develop as it will, have created many surprises and I enjoy the wealth of enigmatic characters that appear in my paintings. Illuminated for a fleeting moment they present themselves to be interpreted however the viewer pleases.

Like all journeys there have been learning curves and discoveries, but along the way I have been surprised, delighted, overwhelmed and still committed to exploring that elusive quality of light.