Thu, 01 Dec 2005
Beware of banality.
I keep noticing the most ordinary things - trees littered with the tatters of greying plastic bags, stumps of long dead trees on roadsides, drawn tyre tracks in muddy lanes. Why I am attracted to these overlooked subjects, only made complex by my acute interest in their banality?

I grew up near to a second world war airfield. The flat, open spaces between the criss-crossing of the old runways were turned over to crops (before industrial redevelopment made way for a creeping expanse of new buildings and businesses in the 1990's). Our kitchen overlooked this vista, a landscape devoid of structure, aside from sky and earth. The only visible changes to it were that of the soil - from freshly ploughed clods, or deep furrows peppered with snow, to the regimental spikes of spring green, or the rustling, harvest shades of gold and brown. Much of my childhood was spent cycling the deserted runways, exploring the small copses of bramble, blackthorn and elder which evolved out of the surrounding scrub. From the crumbled and cracked tracks sprang isolated green patches of wind-sown wheat, grasses or linseed. This was not a picturesque landscape; it contained little joy or celebration, but it was my escape.

Fast forwarding to today, I see that this view of the landscape is ever present in my work. I still see a near level horizon, the melding of greys and the browns on a misty morning, fragmented, disorderly patches of ground. My work appears to celebrate its ordinariness, its blandness, but even banality has hidden depths...

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