Paradoxical Nature

I grew up with artistic parents: my mother was a hobbyist painter and my father had a fascination and talent for extremely detailed and realistic portrait drawings. I think, in particular, my father’s drawings amazed and inspired me. I simply could not have imagined a better artist existing. To open his sketchbook and look at the portraits of Rudolf Nureyev or Victor Mature was something exciting and awe-inspiring.

I began painting because I wanted to say something about the beauty in the natural world, choosing nature as a subject almost as a reaction against the conceptual climate of the times. I am fully cognisant of the horrors and brutalities of life. But my aim is not to depict such matters.

Integrity for an artist is to acknowledge what you were meant to do. Some artists were meant to describe the human condition, the political climate, the atrocities of war, social injustice, etc. I, however, have long since accepted that my calling is to depict the beauty in nature.

From this choice comes a sense of personal integrity. To bring beauty into people’s lives is perhaps as admirable as removing ugliness from people’s lives. The world can never have enough beauty. I grew up with the horrors of the human psyche and know how it can inflict devastating effects upon lives.

One needs to breathe in the beauty of nature to be reminded that suffering is not the whole story. However, my paintings inherent paradoxical nature refers to both: beauty on the surface, suffering in the sub text.