Click to enlarge

With this selection of thirty paintings I thought to feature the use of sunlight and shadow which I have utilized in a wide variety of painting subjects over the years. There have been instances when the exploration of sunlight effects has been the actual subject itself. For example in the painting Shafts of Light in Lincoln Cathedral, painted in 1997. When on a winter day visit of sunshine I witnessed the light shining through the stained glass of the lofty nave. Beams of coloured light bathed the ancient stonework, and any visitor who chanced to pass through the light was to be enriched by it. It was a challenge for me to attempt to record the effect, and to set it in the vast interior space; a step into the unknown, to find ways and means, which subsequently was used again in the Ely painting.

More usual for me is to use light to create atmosphere and mood, as in pictures such as Sunlight on Old Stone, and in Distant Thunder,  sometimes in outdoor settings as in Above the Rail Track. Light and shadow form the basis of many of my paintings to enrich a scene, add colour or changes, or to obscure, to create some mystery or obfuscation if thought necessary and intuition demands it.

Another aspect, less often, is to use patches of sunlight in paintings as an integral part of a composition, as what I think of as the geometry of the whole arrangement in a painting, as in Winter Train Journey and First Steps, and in the outdoor scene of The Arcade, where the man in the foreground is set firmly in a geometrical framework, giving the picture dynamism, strength to the whole setting.