My Story

I can’t remember exactly when I started painting, but my earliest memories suggest that I put as much importance on what something looked like as what was written about it. Illustrations from early stories that I had read to me have stayed with me long after the tales themselves had been forgotten! I think I started painting intentionally because I wanted to able to capture the beauty I saw about me, and once I started, I kept going because I was so frustrated by the gap of what I could see in my mind’s eye and what I could set down on paper! From illustrating adventure books to painting commissions for friends, I spent a lot of my teens with a brush in my hand!

This journey led me to choose Art as a subject at school, and then to go on studying it at college. However, this was where my journey took a turn for the unexpected. I loved art but what was being suggested to me during my A’ Level was that I ought to paint in a style that gave homage to certain artistic movements (for example, abstract depictions of heaped, crushed cars, rusting bolts, old fruit etc). After one particularly dismal assignment, I had given my tutor what they asked for, I couldn’t hold back my parting comment “I can paint this way, but I don’t like it”.

Whilst my older self can appreciate the fact that I needed to study form, texture and so on, somehow the journey had led me to a point where I had ceased to love art as it was presented to me. I was partially rescued from this by looking into the work and ideas of William Morris who, in an age of machines and industry cast his creative imagination back through the years to bring out the memory of beauty and grandeur that had been ebbing away from the late 19th Century world. This opened up a world of artists to me, from Monet and Holman Hunt to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Casper David Friedrich. A picture by the latter, entitled “The Traveller” really captured my imagination. The picture drew me in to adventures hidden in the distant mists, in short, I found my reason to paint again.

That was over thirty years ago now, and since then I have developed my skills and experience across a range of media and widened my circle of artistic tastes and influences. My current favourites are watercolours, oil paints and acrylics. Each type of paint has its own distinctive character and unique visual possibilities and consequently I find myself swapping between them regularly.

These days, I simply paint the scenes and moments that resonate with me, and I do so in my own style. I also love taking on commission work to produce artwork that captures the essence of special places and memories for my customers. I am always happy to chat over ideas with people and to give an idea of the costs to produce the pieces they envisage. Many of the examples on this website were produced as commissioned pieces for people who have a particular association for an image.