A trail through the forest, living and dying, moods and emotions. Journey is about seeking out a visual language to express these things. Journey is about paint and about the illusion created by painting on a flat surface, and using this illusion as language. The image, the familiar, things slightly odd, pushed a bit this way or that, movement and flow, repetitive patterns, interruptions and shifts, all become the medium that creates the journey.

For three decades I have been exploring and painting in Mount Revelstoke National Park. In all those many years the incredible diversity has kept me enthralled. Every season, every turn of the trail offers another glimpse; something new, something familiar, something that makes me yearn for a brush in my hand to try once again to capture oh, just a little of the magnificence.

There comes a turn in life where awareness of the limits is undeniable. A sense of one’s place in history is significant, and day-to-day is no longer as dependable. Small comfort is found in the parallels of this finite truth in all living things. Fare Forward is a visual record of my personal journey towards the wisdom that comes with knowing that, “life does not stand still, fare forward dear soul,” as Ira Dilworth wrote to Emily Carr in the later years of that great artist’s life. Those words written so long ago to comfort an aging friend are the inspiration for Fare Forward. Decades spent in the forests have taught me much about the necessity of failure in the success of life. This angst hones sentience in every living moment, the awe of things simple, the sweet joy of a glance. A rock moved, perhaps it rolled down into the trail, or a limb fell from a tree to settle across the path, insignificant yet notable–these are things I like to speak of in my paintings. The passage of time, the synchronicity and disparity of things aging. I use natural images as a language to express my awareness of how I am just one tiny part of an enormous experience. 

My work is the centre of my being. I have travelled down many paths, done many things, but it is putting paint on paper that has been the binding thread through all. I knew I would be an artist from a young age. In spite of being ‘advised’ to do otherwise, and having done otherwise, I have always returned to the job of expressing in paint my experience of the wonders of this world. I am now at a stage in life where looking back is as significant as looking forward. Time has become clearly finite. These two dynamics are the driving force behind all my current works. Physical changes deny access, memories are not adequate, so I paint what I yearn for. In doing so I have learned to tell the story of life’s angst, of life and death, of hurt and healing. I use nature’s beauty as my genre, it is a comfortable one for most, and with a visual language common to all, I speak of these things in paint.

No matter where I wander I see so many paintings begging to be. They echo in my mind not like memories but like stories still to be told. Sometimes it is only a glimpse while flying by on my bike but it stays long after I am gone.

When I start a work I don't know where it will take me but when it is done, it is like a part of something greater sighs and lets go.

Little details natter, "me, me, me" and often I am surprised when they are revealed in paint.