Stanshope 2

One of the 'Grace and Danger Series' (one of 6), the latest of which were completed in 2009. The series began during a stage of transition from living in the country to living in the city and uses perceptions of things around me whilst out walking in both the familiar domains of the Derbyshire landscape and the banks of the Thames around Hungerford Bridge. The work refers to drawings made at the time - observations of a rapid, annotated kind, some detailed, some minimal. These drawings record moments of intense awareness which occurred without warning but which seem to mark the manifestation of something beyond appearance, something of significance. (James Joyce described such experiences as 'little epiphanies' ). The imagery is intentionally ambiguous, and marked a return to drawing and a severe reduction of colour after a period dominated by intense colour and emphatic brushwork. The paintings are all on canvas, 7ft x 4ft, and use acrylic, compressed charcoal, earth in acrylic dispersion, and pencil on raw cotton duck.