THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS

THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS

THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS

As an artist I’ve always been intrigued (and often frustrated) by the almost unattainable ability to capture the rawness and immediacy of various emotions within a ‘finished’ painting. How do you convey your feelings onto a large work? How do you capture the way one views the world onto a static work? Being a landscape painter there is almost an expectation to create an accurate representation of a beach or a seascape. But when I paint, the challenge I set myself is to attempt to recreate a sense of place whilst maintaining the rawness of feelings, emotions and, often, unease. That is why I throw paint across the canvas, scrawl words amongst the work, rip the paper apart or take a chisel to the board.

Listening to music whilst I paint is critical to my process – including writing lyrics onto the finished works.

There Will Be Fireworks are always on my headphones: their music and words resonating with my feelings. Often called a ‘wintry band’, their music has been compared to downbeat magic as an escape from nine-to-five mundanity. One reviewer reflected that their songs build with the emotional toll of tears swelling at a funeral until they can take no more until they spill their guts on the living room floor. Nicky’s impassioned delivery - where every word feels like it could be the bands last. They are an exhaustive expression of feeling, poetry to music, capturing emotion in their art. That raw emotion is what I attempt to achieve in my paintings.

Over 2023 I have been creating a new body of work, inspired by two decades of TWBF’s music and words. I’m thrilled to have been asked to collaborate with the band to create some pieces to mark their ten-year anniversary of the Dark, Dark Bright.