There are two sources for
the pictures I make, two 'nudges' that get me reaching for a pencil or brush
in reaction: one is the painful side of living, the other is the physical beauty
that nonetheless accompanies us. Making pictures enables me to absorb and deal
with the first (thus also rendering it less destructive). It also gives me the
means of celebrating the second, in the best way I know how.
Sometimes I've left the painting path and veered off into writing, photography
and ceramics. The sources are always the same and the different disciplines
have fed into one another, but in recent years I've come back onto the painting
path. (I'm aware that, in this age of instant reproduction, the brush is akin
to the bicycle in the age of supersonic flight. But that's ok, I love cycling
too - and I live in the main cycling city of Italy).
The first 'guardian angel' started out as a tribute to my own, sorely over-worked
personal one. The 'details from…' are a kind of 'album of greatest hits'
- some of the bits I love from the painters I have admired. Some of the other
works were never planned but took shape on their own as I began. I am currently
working on the basis of old snapshots - with hindsight they seem to have so
much locked up in them.