'Emerald Vault' — Oil and Cold Wax

This large-scale painting was developed over an extended period in the studio, its surface built up through successive layers of oil and cold wax medium. The title refers both to the colour — a deep, saturated green that dominates the composition — and to the sense of enclosure that the vertical forms of the trees create: a vault of branches and foliage that shelters and contains.

Surface and Process

The work was made using a variety of tools — palette knives, rollers, and printing techniques with paper and card. Oil paint thinned with turpentine was poured and trailed across the canvas to simulate the natural flow of light through a forest canopy. The result is a surface of considerable complexity: layers of translucent glaze over impasto, areas of smooth finish alongside heavily worked passages, the history of the painting's making visible in the texture of the dried paint.

The vertical rhythm of the trees is echoed in the swirling textures of the surface. The spaces between the trees are as important as the trees themselves — intervals of silence that give the vertical forms their weight and presence. This is a recurring concern in my forest paintings: the relationship between mark and void, between the painted and the unpainted.

The Forest as Subject

The forest recurs throughout my work not as a subject to be described but as a presence to be inhabited. It is a threshold — a space in which the familiar becomes strange, and in which the act of looking becomes something closer to listening. 'Emerald Vault' is an attempt to hold that quality of attention in paint: to make a surface that rewards sustained looking, that reveals more the longer one stays with it.