'There is a deep-rooted attachment, a primitive instinct to seek divinity in the landscape and nature, to express its potency and its reflection in the inner world of the human heart and mind.'
Allan approaches his work through a conceptual lens that allows him to apprehend unconscious influences and structures and work them into the construction of his art. His painting manifests elements of organic life – Land, Sea and Sky-Scapes as well as objects and forms. He says these elements are usually perceived both by himself and the viewer through free association. However Allan says he does not primarily set out to portray these elements in his paintings in a figurative sense but may sometimes allude to them. It is more accurate to say that he attunes himself to the unconscious aspects of the environment around him both natural and human. These environmental influences readily imprint themselves in his works. His work presents elemental psychic images and forces bound in a structure imbued with his own spiritual exploration.
He is not an abstract painter in the formal sense in that he does not work to a set of rules. The abstract nature of his work comes through the elements of patination, fragmentation and remnants in his work that are expressed in a mythological context. These reflect his interest in what cannot be clearly seen or understood and what is left behind. There are reflections in paintings such as those from the ‘Parallel’ and 'Idris' series of the shifting seascape of the estuary where he lives, the transformation, what remains and what is removed as the tide ebbs and flows. The tidal estuary enveloped by powerful land and sky-scapes could be described in a traditional sense as his current muse.
His work is at once modern and archaic. Allan says his painting has a strong ‘pagan presence’ in the sense that it is associated with place and evolves out of a particular place and experience but also in the sense of belonging to the collective unconscious, dealing with death as well as life and what is left behind after death or change. He says that this is linked to his appreciation of what he sees as mystical qualities in both nature and the human heart and mind, the need to reflect this in art and culture and the way one is reflected in the other. He describes this as a shamanic process, that is, the intuitive interpretation and transformation of what is not immediately apparent but that nevertheless has important unconscious meaning helpful to the deeper integration and understanding of both the specific and the greater context of life. He is also aware that the strong influence of the Judeo-Christian culture in which he was born and brought up is manifest in the archetypal structures that emerge in the construction of his work. However he sees these structures as being both specific and universal in their symbolic nature and just as the Christian culture has always integrated people's symbolic relationship with nature into its canon so Christian symbolism is also ultimately subsumed into nature. He says there is a deep-rooted attachment, a primitive instinct to seek divinity in the landscape and nature, to express its potency and its reflection in the inner world of the human heart and mind. He strongly feels that art is one of the powerfully unique ways of expressing this.