Building Enterprise through the Arts.

I have always been fascinated by images, not just the overall impact of the whole, but equally by the component parts: the colours, textures and shades, and the craft employed in bringing them together. This interest in colour and texture led me to experiment with oils; particularly techniques such as impasto and the use of palette-knives, which enabled me to build up thick, textural layers of paint. I have applied the same aesthetics of colour, texture, shape and shade to urban/industrial landscapes as I do to the more traditionally accepted landscape, in doing so I aim to expose the often overlooked beauty that exists around us everyday but which is veiled by its familiarity.

Last summer I realised a long held dream to visit Cuba . I spent a fortnight travelling through the country, taking hundreds of photographs and wandering the streets of Havana , Cienfuegos and Trinidad. These former centres of colonial splendour and trade, with their elegant, imposing architecture which would have been made from the best materials and shaped by the best craftsmen of the time, today seem to be made of dust, held together only by a bloody-minded determination, a dash of romance and apparently inexhaustible ingenuity. The overwhelming feeling in these great cities of Cuba is one of infinitesimal, inescapable decay. Mould infests every surface; the plaster that covers the street-facing facades of most of the buildings, with its original colours already faded and bleached to be a pale reminder of their original bold glory, is crumbling.

These images are of cityscapes devoid of any iconic buildings; the ordinary city as it offered itself up to the camera lens. The photographs were often taken as the sun was low in sky, which had the effect of offering some luminosity to the faded plasterwork. The setting sun leant mangoes, oranges, reds and other such sympathetic colours, redolent of the tropics, to these battered buildings which have for too long suffered under the glare of the high sun. In painting these scenes in oils I am able to replicate the layering, building steadily upwards from the lustreless undercoats to the final top coat. My paintings are also an attempt to restore some of the lost dignity, to recognise the beauty inherent in these structures even at this point in their decline. There is also a sense of contributing to an archive; who knows how much longer these treasures will stand. In painting these pictures, I had the feeling, similar to that of excavating a bricked-up chimney breast, of the hope that the work of stripping away the accumulated layers will eventually reveal the beautiful original at its foundation.