Dazzling Water: Exhibition of oil paintings & drawings

"Usually painters paint water just as the camera captures it, recording how it looks in a single fraction on a second. The image is frozen. The person looking at the pictures probably recognises the image as one of sequence they have themselves seen, whether a slow swirl reflected on a swimming pool bottom, or the spitting spray on the crest of a wave. Their memory fills in the blanks either side of the frozen moment.

Recently I have been watching the sparkle on the Pang, a fast-flowing stream, as it joined the slow-moving Thames. Each time I stared long and hard at the watersmeet and tried to single out one particular moment to record in paint but I found my eye darted about the water's surface without stopping, distracted from one flash on the sun to another even more inviting. My eyes were led a merry dance across a myriad of attractions and my brain found it increasingly difficult to try and assimilate exactly what I was looking at. 

My usual method of painting a subject is to analyse what is before me and then set about recording my findings on paper. This time the constant change before my eyes defied analysis. Then I suddenly realised there was an alternative way to describe the subject without choosing to freeze a particular second as would the camera.

Instead I assembled a conglomeration of pastel strokes that suggested the rapid moves my eyes had to make when surveying the various portions of the whole turmoil of movement before them. Some sections were predominantly bright and flashing, others were quieter, more slowly moving; some warmer in colour, others much cooler.

The result is a choas of unpredictable lines and curves of direction scattered over the whole. Instead of recording a single instant, my paintings are full of inviting journeys for the viewer's eyes to take and experience over time the pleasure of exploring the dazzle of sun on water."