Meteora

In the autumn of 1995 an opportunity to join my partner as an English teacher in Greece came up. I gathered up my paints and moved into her tiny apartment in Trikala, which is about a five hour bus journey north of Athens near the Pindos mountains. I set up a little studio in the hallway and would try to paint in the evenings after teaching English to intermittently responsive Greek teenagers during the day. The longer we were there, the more I grew to love Greece; the people the culture, the history but most of all the scenery. Every weekend we would go up to the nearby village of Kalambaka which is at the base of the extraordinary Meteora chain of cliff and rock formations. At the top of the major peaks there are ancient monasteries which you can reach by tackling insanely perilous paths, stairways and steps. It is a truly magical place. The atmosphere of the place infected me and I would return to my paintings trying to find a way to emulate what I was seeing and feeling through abstract paintings. Eventually these became focused on the weathered patterns and marks that so uniquely covered the Meteora rock faces. I began to tear and collage the paper paintings and try to mimic the almost calligraphic marks that were on the rocks. I never completed these pieces. However, when we eventually returned to England and I began working as an art teacher, I fished out the old collages and decided to use them as a way to learn how to manipulate imagery in Photoshop. This was very new technology to me at the time but the resultant prints were some of the most successful and popular abstracts I ever made. The images here are more recent versions of the same process. In honour of their Hellenic beginnings, I have titled them after Greek place names, stories or myths.