'The Presence of Absence'

I am a landscape artist working in the Romantic tradition where landscape becomes a metaphor for inner states as well as an expression of the numinous. I love being alone in nature and am immensely drawn to a sense of beauty and of transience. I work with soft pastel as I find paint too fluid a medium for me. I like to make marks as opposed to brushstrokes. The fragility of the medium also attracts me. It's like painting with dust. I always work on Black paper. Allowing the image to emerge from the darkness is a meaningful part of the process for me. I am not particularly interested in naturalism, but in art as a synthesis of remembered and felt experience and the use of symbolism to convey meaning. 'The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.' Caspar David Friedrich 1810