“My paintings are very rarely of specific places, although the genesis of an idea for a painting might have been initially prompted by a particular location. In this particular exhibition, the paintings on display reflect my time spent in Australia, Tasmania, Spain, France, England and Lanzarote. I never paint ‘en plain air’. I might do a very sketchy line drawing of a hillside or a watercourse but not always. I only put brush to canvas in my London studio and this could be many months later. When I am looking at a landscape that is exactly what I do - look. I am not looking so I can remember the details and reproduce it, like a photograph, in my studio. What I want to remember is how it makes me feel, what lies beneath the surface, what it sounds like. Listening is as important as looking. It is this feeling, and the changing feeling that I have when recollecting the landscape months later, that I am trying to express on the canvas. Over the period of time between the first experience and the recollection of it, my feelings about it have evolved and taken on many layers and that is what is on the canvas - layers of memory, layers of emotion and, indeed, layers of pigment. The process of trying to put the experience on canvas is like a conversation. I’ll open with some initial colours, let them dry, see what they have to say to me, agree or disagree, add some more and so on, building up a multi-layered image which speaks to me and, hopefully, the viewer on many levels. I would hope that there is something in the composition or the colours that initially arrest the viewer’s attention but that a longer look will begin to reveal some of the complexities that lie behind and beneath all landscape. Abstraction is a way of trying to address this complexity and invite the viewer to experience my emotional reactions and to add their own.”

- Miki van Zwanenberg