“I always paint directly in front of the subject,” he says. “I’m not after a photographic or clichéd idea of the sea, but a specific mood. You can never capture one moment, so you have to capture mood. You never quite know what that mood is, and it is constantly changing; that is half the battle.”
He rarely captures what he is after in one sitting. “It often takes me a while: weeks or even months,” he says. “Nature is so evocative, but it is also so hard to pin down.” He will usually paint a scene, realise what he’s done is not quite ‘right’, and then return sometime later to the same spot, and paint over is original painting. “This may happen many times,” he says. “The painting downstairs by the door took several years. It is actually five or six paintings on top of one another.”
The attic of his house is full of unfinished works, which he may or may not go back to. “They are unresolved, but they are nagging at me,” he says. “I bring them out occasionally. They suggest different ways forward.” So how does he know when they are finished? “The painting speaks to me. It says ‘leave it, stop.’ Sometimes this gives me a jolt, like a friend telling you some kind of truth about yourself. Regrettably sometimes I ignore this, and I overwork the paintings and they’re gone.”
Sometimes the paintings are brought to a more Porlockian conclusion. “The screech of traffic can bring me out of my communion with nature,” he says. “Or somebody approaching me and saying something, which might be a sign to stop. Things like ‘what’s that you’re doing?’ Or ‘can you paint my dog?’” AL