Artist’s Statement

Instead of starting as an artist, by a circuitous route I started a business in my mid twenties that researched human behaviour. One of the techniques that we pioneered was eye tracking, equipment that allowed us to see what people look at. I became a specialist in how we see and how specialised the human brain is in interpreting icons and symbols and how those symbols are the stimulus to memory and thus interpretation of meaning.

Any landscape painting is interpreted through a learnt “frame” of viewing, one that reaches back to Claude, and any composition, through our visual memory of paintings, art direction in film and television, etc. thus creates a cultural frame of unspoken meaning.

Any viewer of paintings will also be from a world saturated with images, many of them with commercial interpretation and any symbol or icon will stimulate memory sated with other messaging. My process aims to remove both the frame and the icon so that the viewer is asked to look without seeing but feeling.