Roger's Profile

About

After retiring early from a demanding and sometimes very stressful professional career as a Chartered Surveyor I decided the time was right to fulfill my ambition and concentrate on my art. I have drawn and painted in various mediums since my childhood and this passionate interest in being creative has always been part of my persona.

Principally I am a traditional and contemporary English landscape artist working in oils, pastels and acrylic. I also enjoy observing life and will use pencil, and pen and ink to produce finished drawings and sketches of subjects that capture my interest. Many of these works are based on travel overseas, especially in Mediterranean Europe,  India, Central and South America.

Travel the world, but home is always best. Dorset is a very beautiful county, renowned for its World Heritage coastline and unspoilt countryside. It has been my home for nearly 30 years and is the inspiration for most of my work.

I have experimented with watercolour, pastel, acrylic and oil but over the years have acquired a particular passion for the graphic qualities of soft pastel.  Now, pastel and also the very different medium of oil remain my two preferred methods of working . I use acrylic to produce preliminary studies for studio paintings and have developed my own style enabling me to capture and replicate the effects and appearance of pastel using special brush techniques. 

An artist must never remain static but continue to develop and express feelings for art in different and creative ways. For that reason I constantly push the boundaries beyond my immediate comfort zone.  My preference is to remain flexible in outlook and paint in a variety of media choosing the one best suited to convey my feelings for the subject and my creative mood at the time.

I am a full exhibiting member of Bournemouth Arts Club / Southern Contemporaries

My Inspiration

My landscapes can be moody and dramatic. Acknowledging the accepted principle of Gestalt I try to keep detail to a minimum so that the viewer of my work can participate, interpret and discover. My aim is for each painting to be fresh, loose and subjective. The main influences on my work are Edward Seago, Trevor Chamberlain, JMW Turner, Claude Lorraine and Norfolk teaching artist Martin Kinnear. Others include Cuyp and Donald Hamilton Fraser.

For pastel work I enthuse about the work of American pastelists Bill Creevy and Albert Handell. Also, Margaret Dyer, Lorianne Signori, Felicity House and of course Edgar Degas.

My Approach

In the last two years I have switched my focus from pastel to oils. The transition period has enriched my mark-making skills and numerous sketches executed in acrylic have developed my ability to achieve pastel painting effects in wet mediums. Increasingly my work is becoming much looser in style with controlled, but expressive and energetic brushwork.

I have been taught to paint in oils in the traditional English landscape manner. This is “rough painting” rather than fine art verging on illustration. I try to be proficient in my use of Venetian and Flemish boles,” coloured beginnings” and imprimatura laid down in tempera or distemper. I strive to control opacity and translucency and practice the indirect painting process of applying translucent glazes.

On abstraction I follow the lead of Martin Kinnear who says that” he goes beyond Constable but stops well short of Rothko”. This is a skill that requires constant effort and attention because it is far more difficult to exclude detail than to include it.