My recent drawing has been focused on integrating figure and landscape motifs. The figures have arisen out of sculptures I made in 2013 based on Henri Matisse’s painting, Bathers by the River.

I am searching for a synthesis of these figures with drawings of tree and branch shapes I commenced at Hill End earlier in 2014, which I have since developed in the studio.

The trees themselves can become figures in relation to the ground and air they stand in. I have also recently become much more aware of and intrigued by the negative spaces between things and the points where the contours of objects meet the edge of the frame. The shapes described by the branches have a musical quality in the way they punctuate space. I see them as passages in a musical score.

Giorgio Morandi was very aware of the phenomena of the spaces between things and expressed it powerfully in his landscape painting and more subtly in his still life work.

Franz Kline explored it emphatically in his large-scale abstract expressionist paintings where assertive black scaffold like armatures of paint articulate the surface.

Chinese and Japanese landscape painting with their calligraphic marks and flattened pictorial space are also an influence, as are the collages of Robert Motherwell and the stick drawings of Brice Marden. Ian Fairweather  and Tony Tuckson, John Passmore, John Olsen and Peter Upward are key inspirations closer to home.

There is a wonderful canon to draw from..…in a search for my own language of marks.