Richard Sharland

I deeply enjoy the actions of painting, the process of a painting evolving, developing its own life: it is an act of translation in which mind and body, spirit and emotion are one: I can lose myself and find sense, feeling, meaning. Watercolour is luminous and unpredictable, it is light and it wants to play; I like layering with acrylics - overpainting - and working with found objects, incorporating ideas and references that aren’t evident; collage is also playful, and I see the fragments reflecting memory - seemingly both random and organised - and how they can be reassembled to form a new whole which reveals something previously unseen. I hope the viewer can find something similar from their own experience when looking at the completed painting, making a connection beyond the visual surface; it acts as a doorway, an opening. Much of my work is rooted in landscape, in place. Sometimes an actual place, sometimes an inner landscape evoked by a place, a moment in time, a memory of an experience. I paint to explore these relationships between space and time, place and knowledge, and to do this by taking a journey with the materials.