This painting is one of a pair, ‘River 1 and River 2’, both of which are 760mm x 760mm x 55mm and created using acrylic and collage on cradled panel.

In both of these paintings, I returned to a recurring theme in my work, the Cumbrian landscape - this time focussing on my experience in and around rivers.

I wanted to portray some of the physicality of the experience of being in a Cumbrian river by working at a large scale, where the relationship of the painting to the body is very immediate and where, for example, I am not using my wrists to make marks but rather my whole arm. Also, it is an experience that when I work on the painting, I am pretty much ‘in it’ as I make it. 

The immediacy of this way of working means that as well as the memory of the river-experience informing the work, it is also a state in which I am very much working in the present and responding with my whole body to events that happen along the way, during the process of making the painting itself. 

Sometimes a colour or a junction of shapes catches my attention and leads me down a route of its own. By swapping between the positions of standing back and of ‘diving in’ to work on the painting, it gradually develops as a to-ing and fro-ing between a state of control when conscious recall, reflection and adjustments of and to what I am doing are the guiding force, and a state of release as the process of painting absorbs me and intuitive mark-making takes over.