This Is My Church

I took this photo on a sunny evening last week; at the time I was celebrating the sun’s appearance…a bit of a rare event in recent weeks.

Today I looked again and realised it contains a few clues to my latest series of paintings inspired by the ancient flower meadows of Clattinger Farm (more about that here).

These paintings use a lot of gold. Gold paint, gold leaf and gold oil pastel. The gold reacts to light making the viewing experience immersive and otherworldly. As the light changes so does the painting, echoing the continual changes in the meadows.

Gold has a long history in art. It was traditionally a sacred colour used to depict deities. And the sun. In my work I use it to represent my reverence to the natural world and encourage a quiet contemplation of its beauty.

 The latest paintings have a direct line to a series of work I made at the OBRAS artist’s residency in Portugal. The series was called ‘This is my Church’. It was inspired by the beautiful gold mosaics on the walls of a local church, the traditional white and blue of the studio walls and the pale gold of the summer fields. And of course, the Faithless classic God is a DJ. These are from 2010.

Some things change a lot but some things are constant, a meadow is still my church.

Please get in touch if you would like an online pdf of available works with pricing or any information about the Clifton Contemporary show or others coming up.