STATEMENT

I grew up in a small village in Wales, where daily conversation was full of comments on changing skies, direction of wind, and behavior of the birds and animals living around me. Thus, the dark granite mountains and windswept sea, flocks of circling ravens, and wild ponies, became primary to my early visual vocabulary.

I came to California in 1967, after graduating with Honors in Fine Art from the University of Manchester. Young, and still unformed as an artist, I was none-the-less quickly assimilated into the Los Angeles gallery scene. Four years later, I left the city for a more solitary life in the Santa Cruz mountains, establishing my studio in a wild area of Bonny Doon, where I have lived and worked ever since.

The discovery of mono-type printing in the early nineties catalyzed a breakthrough in my painting process. Painting on a plate, rather than directly on paper or canvas, freed me from a deliberateness I felt had begun to hamper spontaneity in my work. I found the marriage of painted plate and printing press kept me open to possibility. Gesture and expression came easily working on the smooth surface, and unanticipated texture and surprise "accidents" gave the work fresh vitality.

I discovered that torn paper chine colléd to the mono-type added an abstract element that gave more scope of expression. Furthermore, as someone who has more imagery in mind than I have time to paint, the momentum of working in mono-type suited my temperament: an idea could be initially expressed rapidly through mono-type, then developed further with other media, to give the piece more substance and "hand".

Though much of my work is informed by my resonance with nature, in the last few years I have become aware that the imagery of my work springs either from my roots in rural Wales, or from the natural world around me here in California. And now these often integrate in a single painting, suggesting a deeper coalescence of my two cultures. For instance, the American coyote emerged as an icon of the peripheral self-reliance once suggested by the wild ponies of Wales. However, the coyote may be seen in a landscape where a weathered blackthorn stands as icon of my Welsh origins.