It’s this physical immersion in landscape, the resonance between an internalized world and an external one that I’m after, and as I draw and paint, it spills out onto the page - active engagements with landscape, intuitive responses reflecting energy and confusion, fleeting moments - that particular turquoise colour that suddenly appears.

Hand poised above my board, the moment before I make a line, I occupy liminal position between place and mark, between inner and outer state. These are not accurate topographical depictions, but more about reflecting movement through time, what is sensed - I can’t say even understood.

Conversations with fishermen and story-tellers of the sea, with oceanographers who talk about wave trajectories and extremes waves and show me oceanographic diagrams and algebraic formulae, have played a role in the making of my studio paintings (look close and you might find an extreme wave formulae hidden amongst the waves). And through my own history and engagement with the sea, I too am embedded in these paintings.

Drawing’s virtue is that it can be unstable and fluid; so to is my painting. A painting can be highly controlled, delicate, they can be automatic and chaotic, a wild act, a response to chance encounters. Drawings and paintings made in my studio don’t – can’t - have the immediacy of work made en plein air; they may hint at or evoke a ‘physical reality’, equally they might be more about what I think I saw or imagined, making them even more elusive or suggestive of the transitory nature of the sea, and perhaps then a truer interpretation. All these encounters provide a kind of ‘polyvocal’ aspect to my work, within them a fusion of memories and impressions, narratives and imagination, and a growing understanding of nature.

(Janette Kerr)