Norbert lynton: [ essay 1999]
"His small works, mainly done in pastel, strike one as dedicated to colour: to the blues of sea and sky and of day and night. Divisions in them relate to seen horizons, delicate or sudden according to the light, but above all horizontal, just a section of something extending right and left but here made whole in itself. He must both contain those horizons and let them stretch: watch for the ways in which he does that. At the same time, these new paintings are also about colour. Some of the small ones could well be seen as colour compositions, centred colour chords beautiful in themselves, distilled from particular memories. On the broader stages of his large paintings, compositional arrangemants become more significant: vivid colours against whites and greys, jagged shapes against bands and other broad areas and formal echoes and rhythms have to be disposed soas to keep the whole surface alive. The whole has to work with and through its parts. Thick and thin paint has to deliver the right weight and visibility, and the flatness versus spatial suggestion that each landscape painting has to combine. And all the time the painter has to hold on to the initial experience that led to this work and validates it"
"His many conscious and instinctual choices, rooted in his experience of art itself as well as working with the visible world, give his pictorial statements some independence of it. His materials both serve and command: paint or pastel, canvasses or sheets of paper, sizes, proportions - he has to make decisions about these, and usually stays with them once they are made. - His sketchbooks simulate and propose subjects and arrangements. At any one moment, his spirit, together with what drives him to be a painter at all, leads him to workk on this and not on that. We, coming to see the results, may speak of direction and influence, but the possibilities before him at any moment are well-nigh infinite and all the time he is deciding what not to do, never or just today, and what to focus on and begin to work with. And 'working with' includes a whole range of processes, from experimentation to fine tuning at the end"