Lockdown Etudes (2020)

etude (noun); a short musical composition, typically for one instrument, designed as an exercise to improve the technique or demonstrate the skill of the player. Origin: mid 19th century from French, literally, ‘study’.

During lockdown, I took refuge in these small, technical pieces or etudes as I came to think of them. The subjects are often closer to home and draw on my love of flowers (I worked as a florist with Saskia Havekes in Sydney for 5 years), vessels, the domestic interior and painting itself. They are also the means with which I could attend to and indulge my passion for the formal qualities of painting, namely colour, tone, mark-making and proportion. Not deliberately, but definitely consistently, I draw on the diptych as a means of creating a viewfinder (or armature) to frame the main subject and open it out to the more abstract forces governing perception and our relationship to sight.