Pystyll Rhaeadr

This piece was produced for the Beep International Painting Prize, the theme was 'This must be the place I never wanted to leave'. Pystyll Rhaeadr is a local waterfall I have been visiting since I was a child and is a place that (like a lot of Welsh countryside) is straight out of a fairy tale. Needless to say it has a lasting hold upon me yet in many attempts and mediums I have failed to capture it as it sits in my mind. This is my first attempt at it in my own medium I call Gel. Gel consists of oil paint injected into a transparent gel with a syringe, like a sculptural painting. This allows me to work with not only colour, but texture to. As it is free from surface and has the added dimension it allows me to more fully realise a place or an object without normal sculptural or painterly constraints. It is like being able to leave brush strokes in mid air and enables the viewer to engage with a painterly environment and to ‘touch’ the pigment with their eyes. I call the space inside the box my ‘infinite fun space’ because inside it anything is possible. As I have wanted to combine a sense of my childhood memory with the actuality of the site I have employed a number of little tricks like different textures, forced perspective and bold colours to communicate a sense of the place I carry with me and that which I experience each time I return.