Lot Essay
‘His physical engagement with the canvas during the act of painting is both energetic and exhausting but one that springs from an intuitive and absolute commitment to his subject. “All my past is in my painting,” he says, “and not only my own past but the past of my ancestors too.” Using a palette knife to create a sense of movement within the paint … the artist creates a tension between abstraction and topographical accuracy, the canvas becoming a means of linking the transient with the eternal. The viewer is drawn in by the tautness of the marks on the canvas as the original violence and power of nature is re-created before them’ - Nicholas Sinclair