I work on small boards, medium and large sized canvases in oil. My current practice seeks to find a correspondence between the materiality of paint and an emotional response to a sense of place. I am drawn to degraded and fractured landscapes both urban and rural - the quiet stillness of flooded land, the impenetrable darkness of dense vegetation, the desolate loneliness of unpopulated underpasses and abandoned interiors.

I often use photographic images as a shortcut to the inner subject. A photograph may resonate with my sensibility but I do not rely or depend on the image as such. Although my paintings are recognisably figurative I am not interested in depicting realism in itself. Having located my subject my attention quickly shifts to the process of painting. All my senses are alert to this moment of engagement. This is the work of painting, of being in the moment, responding to what is happening in real time. Paying attention to the mercurial properties of oil paint - to the viscosity of the thick globules, the thin delicate dribbles, the shadowy veils - capturing, rejecting, or building on to make a painting that one hopes gets near to a pictorial equivalence of the primary experience.

Christine Percy studied at Manchester College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. She was a prize winner at the Northern Young Contempories and exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery London. She has work in the Arts Council  England. For many years she was involved as a Lecturer in Art & Design education, latterly as Dean of Faculty at the University for the Creative Arts at Epsom. Christine Percy has now returned to her practice full time.