About Me

I got my school cert in art back in 1975, but life had other plans, family, work, time slipping by the way it does. It wasn't until my late 40s that I finally picked up a brush and said, right, let's do this. Going back to university wasn't an option for me, so I built my own frames from scratch, stretched my own canvas, and figured it out as I went. Those first paintings were simple, but I could see something there. That was enough to keep going.

For over 20 years now I've been painting, and the mediums have kept evolving, acrylics, watercolour mixed with acrylic, pressed inkwork, sketches, and work on glass and mirror. I love a big canvas. Not just big in size, but big in idea, and I build and stretch every one myself, so I can make it exactly the shape and scale I imagine. Some of my canvases don't even sit flat. I've built three-dimensional warped frames that bend and curve, because sometimes a flat surface just isn't enough to hold what you're trying to say.

I work with bold colours and stylised shapes, and I usually paint to tell a story. I've gone through themes, bridges, robots, stylised faces, buildings, and I find that picking a subject and asking what else could live in this world is where some of the best ideas come from. People sometimes tell me I should use more shadow, more dark tones. And I'm always open to learning. But my paintings keep coming out colourful, so I think that's just the way I see things. Colour carries emotion just as much as the image itself does.

Outside of painting, I write poetry and music, and play acoustic guitar. Creativity doesn't really stop at the edge of a canvas for me. I also have a deep and serious relationship with coffee, and I'm rarely far from a Rubik's cube. Art, to me, is like that first coffee of the morning. It wakes something up. It gets you thinking, gets you curious, makes you ask why did they paint it that way. I hope when you look at my work, it does a little of that for you too.