Home and Latest Paintings Photography About the Artist

This website was produced to show-case my paintings, as well as share some photos I have taken that I find interesting. Below is a small meandering piece about me and the broader influences of my artwork.


I grew up in the north-eastern coastal town of Redcar, a once thriving Victorian tourist destination, whose image has long since faded. However it retains its proximity to areas of open-spaced beauty in the North-York Moors and the Coatham coastline with it's steelworks backdrop*. I find places like these make you acutely aware of the scale of the world and your own relatively small part in it. But to me this is a positive thing, helping to draw you out of yourself, perhaps giving a little perspective to a problem, or a keeping a general sense of grounding. I wouldn't be so grand as to claim my paintings could invoke similar feelings, but certainly as I produce them I often have some underlying need to add scale and perspective, to make the main subject(s) feel part of a greater world.


After graduating from Teesside University I was given reason to move to London by my brother, for which I remain eternally grateful because it is a truly fascinating place to be. It's blessed with a bewildering amount of art and culture, all of it layered over a wealth of greenspace, waterways, architecture and technology. It has its cracks and imperfections but they too can hold an appeal, even if they aren't conventionally attractive. From the graffiti riddled brownspaces along the trainlines to some dated structural monstrosity that 30 years ago was the jewel of modern London, so much can spark interest. My paintings would not exist without this sense of fascination in the world around me that I have absorbed from living here.


I suppose the best illustration of what I try to do in my pictures is in relationship I have with other peoples artwork. When I view a piece of art my interaction with them is one-way, by which I mean that I do not seek to project my own thoughts back onto the piece or infer the motives of the artist. I don't feel artwork needs to overtly say anything and trying to find a message or discuss the reasoning feels somehow artificial and an unnecessary addition to the art itself. Instead its the immediate visual impact that I enjoy; a striking combination of colours, the use of shape and proportion, the clarity of an image. In this respect, when I create something, first and foremost I want it to be interesting to the viewer from the very first glance. I like to use limited palettes of bold and contrasting colours that provide a glimpse of some imagined place, which in me at least, stimulates some basic level of curiosity, like when viewing an object on the horizon as the sun sets behind it.