I have lived in north Pembrokeshire for over twenty years - before moving here I visited regularly for holidays - and I now feel I have a deep affinity with this unique landscape.
Walking in Pembrokeshire has always been my passion – I must have walked hundreds of miles over the years in all seasons and in all weathers – along the rugged coastal path above cliff-bound coves, across wide, windy beaches, on the bare blue-stone hills and in the ancient oak woods and secret green valleys of this marvellously varied county.
The things I see while out walking inspire my paintings: low white-washed cottages and grey-stone farmhouses, small lichen-walled fields of early potatoes, black-faced sheep dotted across hillsides, wind-bent hawthorn bushes and always the ever-changing sea. I paint entirely from my imagination, creating very personal interpretations of places remembered from my walks, some places are real, others are imagined.
Walking also makes me very aware of the seasons - the colours of the sky and the sea and the land are constantly changing with the weather and as the year turns. And the colours I see in this landscape are vivid and bold – violet storm clouds, a viridian-green inlet, a cerulean blue sky, a silver river, a purple hill-side.
And, for me, the landscape I see is full of small but essential detail. Pembrokeshire’s wild flowers are an especially important part of this – snowdrops, blackthorn blossom and bluebells in the spring, red campions, ox-eye daisies and foxgloves in the summer, purple heather and russet bracken in the autumn. And in every season the blazing yellow glow of gorse flowers in hedgerows and on hillsides, even bursting through a rare fall of snow in the depths of winter.
Birds and animals are also an integral part of my Pembrokeshire landscape - the sudden flash of the first swallow on a spring morning, an evening fox running across a moonlit field, a kestrel hovering motionless in the heat of a mid-summer afternoon, a dolphin leaping high out of a calm sea, a pair of buzzards soaring in circles over the fields, a gold- speckled barn owl drifting softly by in the frosty moonlight.
So, all of this I paint into my pictures to convey what are for me the definitive elements of the north Pembrokeshire landscape.
