COASTLINES, an exhibition of drawings, paintings and collages inspired by the coastal landscapes of Scotland.

I have always been fascinated by seaside communities, particularly those built on steep inclines. I have made drawing expeditions to similar places in Italy and Greece over many years but this body of work relates to much closer to home. I have family connections with Arbroath and visited regularly throughout my childhood and spent the summer there as a Hospitalfield scholar while at art college.

I first visited Gardenstown with my parents and grandparents back in the 1970s, making drawings with my father and began returning regularly about a decade ago to make studies of the topography; the village with its buildings clinging to the hillside, the blue-grey rooftops and white gable ends scattered like musical notes across a page of sheet music and the neighbouring red roofs of Crovie, punctuating the green farmlands beyond. The most recent paintings are from a summer trip to Lewis, touring with an old art college friend who is from the island and making drawings, seeking out a simpler approach and embracing the remoteness and isolation of the communities.

These works reflect sustained observations of particular places, recorded initially through drawing, seeking an underlying sense of structure and abstraction and then developing a suitable vocabulary of mark making through a process of evident trial and error with collage and paint, until some kind of satisfactory conclusion is hopefully reached.