These works are concerned with the abstract landscape around me and its relationship with the natural world. My Green Barbican was my contribution to an international online artist project where the brief was to "only paint with green" a colour often avoided by many artists. The two long works on linen are in response to my research into the works of Helen Frankenthaler and her experiments thinning out oil paint so that it almost appears like watercolour - a "stained" effect. Landscape with Sunrise and The Barbican Landscape are abstract works very much inspired by the tangible effect of living high above the Barbican Estate where I bear witness to fiery sunsets reminiscent of the African sunrises and sunsets which are also invoked in these works. I see a connection between the landscapes of Africa - its wide open spaces as well as the mountains, the yellow of the veld in summer, and the concrete landscapes around me in the Barbican where the sun can alter the tones of the concrete leading it to look almost pink or deep red at the height of a summer day. There is a clear "apocalyptic" theme in Barbican Landscape Reimagined as I look forward to an imagined landscape of a future where climate change has eroded our cities leaving us with a kind of volcanic crater. This latter image draws on past images of the Barbican after the area was bombed during the war and this area of the City was left looking like a volcanic crater. Both landscapes are rooted in history - both my own childhood in South Africa and that of the City of London. Here, under the Barbican gardens and lakeside area, a medieval Jewish cemetery lies invisible to present day eyes (@the_jewish_square_mile). The abstract forms in Landscape with Sunrise and Barbican Landscape Reimagined bear witness to the presence of these lives, graves, bodies, bones beneath the waters and land upon which we live. It is an imagined underworld lost to the past as well as an imagined future landscape.
