New drawing: ‘Poet on the Run’
My visual ideas evolve in series and across media. Recent work follows on from a series of ink drawings last year that provided a counterpoint to the more geometric compositions I had employed, which involved irregular grid structures.
I often think in terms of a pictorial realm in which the figures I invent come alive. The direction of travel is usually from monochrome drawings into small-scale paintings realised in oil or egg tempera; yet sometimes new painterly forms serve as the starting point for a new drawing.
Poet on the Run, 2026, graphite on Somerset paper, 32 x 22 cm
If all this sounds a bit dry or intellectual it’s probably worth explaining that I think I have arrived at this way of working to deal with very powerful and otherwise unruly feelings in order to transform the inchoate into a form that can contain it. Of course, this approach is nothing new, and some might be reminded of Wordsworth’s description of poetry as "Emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Since art must be allowed to unsettle as much as delight, I would instead prefer to think about feelings finding form.
