When I look back at my work, especially across the last thirty years, I can see that landscape has never really been about depiction. I am not trying to record what I see or describe a place as it appears. What I am drawn to is a subtler presence. How things change when you return to them. How light changes, how weather alters the space, and how that slowly feeds into the marks. How my own focus wanders and then comes back again.
Landscape, for me, is not an image to be captured. It is a way of marking experience.
I keep returning to the question: what happens if we stop asking what we are looking at, and start asking how we are looking?
In How to Be Both by Ali Smith, a character, Carol, asks her children, while standing in a gallery in Ferrara, “What do we see, or how do we see?” It is such a small shift in emphasis, but it opens everything up. Smith suggests that meaning does not sit neatly inside the artwork itself, waiting to be understood. It emerges through encounter. Through mood. Through the time of day. Through where the work sits, and where we stand in relation to it. We do not arrive empty-handed. We bring ourselves.
I have always felt close to this way of thinking, and to John Berger’s writing in Ways of Seeing. Berger reminds us that looking is never neutral. Our habits of attention and our beliefs are always present, whether we are aware of them or not. Art does not offer a single truth. It opens things up. Sometimes it contradicts itself. Sometimes it asks us to stay longer than we expect. To look again. To resist closing things down too quickly.
There is a line from the Tao Te Ching I have often returned to: “The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way.” It feels relevant here. Not as an explanation, yet as a reminder. That understanding is not fixed. That experience cannot be fully named. That staying close to something does not mean trying to define it.
I have always found it interesting how galleries write the short biographical texts that sit alongside my work. They take my words, rearrange them, add their own interpretations, and shape the text into something new. In a way, these biographies are their own kind of abstraction, layering looking and response, memory and understanding. They echo the process of the paintings themselves: fragmentary, intuitive, not fixed.
Sometimes I am surprised by how closely what I have offered is received, and by how the language comes back to me, carrying the same intentions I felt while making the work. That sense of conversation, of ideas moving back and forth, feels quietly affirming. It reminds me that the work does not live in a single voice. It lives in how it is read, written about, and understood by others.
Sometimes I wonder about how obvious it is. The fact that so many artists, myself included, return to nature again and again. Is it a cliché? Perhaps. But it is also inevitable. Nature is not a subject we grow out of. It is not a phase. It is where we live, and what we are made of. The underlying rhythms shape how we see, how we think, how we move through the world. The trees, the weather, the light, they are not metaphors. They are constants. What shifts our attention? Our relationship with them. I think that is what I keep returning to. Not nature as image, but nature as a quiet structure beneath things. Something to lean into.
It is not always easy to write about ideas, especially when the work itself lives quietly and needs no explanation.
As Louise Bourgeois once said, “If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.”
But I do feel it matters. Abstraction is such a large, open-ended term, and many artists consider themselves abstract painters. I am one of them. But for me, the work is firmly rooted within the still patterns of the natural world and tuned to the brevity of the human condition. It comes from repetition and return. From paying attention to small shifts. From staying long enough for something to change.
That is where abstraction sits for me. Not as a move away from landscape, but as a way of staying with it. The marks arrive slowly, formed by duration. The paintings are not really about what is seen. They are about how seeing happens.
Abstraction is not a withdrawal from landscape. It is a way of remaining close, without trying to hold it still.