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CAN’ T SEE THE WOOD FOR THE TREES (2024/25) 

During the past year I have been going through a challenging medical situation. My prognoses were very unclear at times, and I had a great deal of changing and challenging information coming my way. When I began to feel healthier, I started drawing again. I always begin a new body of work by drawing. In this case, drawing helped me process what I had gone through while opening up painting potential. The complexity of scrutinizing nature is similar to the complexity of medical information: the minutiae can make one lose the big picture. 

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CAN’T SEE THE WOOD FOR THE TREES is a body of work that evolved during the past year. I did drawings in Finnerty Gardens at the University of Victoria, near my home on Vancouver Island. It is a very quiet, semi-wild forested garden with pathways and benches,  conducive to meditation. Through long periods of sitting and observing, I could immerse myself in the surrounding details of the gardens and focus on drawing. My physical act of drawing en plein air had to slow down, as I noted and recorded with drawing materials the details that collectively culminated into the bigger picture.  

After multiple visits to draw in the gardens, I began painting in my studio. The drawings provided the clarity of the subject which I translated with paint. The larger canvases and larger scale of mark-making and gestures in paint provided spaces in which I re-constructed my memories of the gardens. 

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Throughout my painting life I have often sought out different kinds of landscapes to provide a catalyst for a new body of work. It’s exciting, and the different experiences of places, spaces and times directly influence my work, both as drawings and as paintings. Differences may suggest particular pallets, brush marks and gestural scale. Recently I have been finding more and more to work from: the familiar landscapes of my own garden, or a particular walk, and the experience of just being in my studio looking out the windows offer new and different kinds of visual relationships rooted in my own inner and outer histories. Making such work liberates me from any responsibility of being true to appearances, and becomes more like a conduit to filter my life. 

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Some of the garden world inevitably crept into my studio and into this series, but I approached these ‘inner’ studio still lifes in exactly the same way as the ‘outer’ landscapes, noting and sorting through visual details and minutiae that over time collectively describe a bigger picture. 

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08 June 2025

Drawings

Paintings

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