I was born in London but now live in Wiltshire and I am a largely self-taught artist, being an electrical engineer in a former life. I started painting watercolours then moved on to oils and acrylic and recently have been producing pastel portraits of both humans and animals.
While working at the Tyne shipyards I started painting watercolours of the Northumberland coast and castles, exhibiting at Newcastle and Wallsend. I later moved to the South West and after taking early retirement studied life painting at Bath College and Advanced Visual Studies at Wiltshire College. I have exhibited at the Hot Bath gallery in Bath and the Wiltshire and Somerset area. My paintings have sold throughout the UK as well as New Zealand & South Africa.
I enjoy the challenge of painting different subject matter using various media and techniques. As well as portrait commissions I also produce landscapes, seascapes and interiors, all often having a figurative content.
My paintings attempt to capture a moment in time and invite the viewer to consider the frozen moment. I hope the painting results in a process of communication between the artist and the viewer, with the picture acting as the channel through which my visual and emotional responses to the subject evoke a similar experience for the spectator.
The ideas and references for a painting originate from many forms; the memory of something seen, pictures cut out from magazines and my own photographs and sketches can all find their way into a picture. I paint in a fairly traditional method, building up the layers of paint to give a depth of colour and although working in a representational way I hope that the way I use the brush and palette knife (and sometimes fingers) gives the painting a life of its own.
