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I am an artist currently living and working in London. This website includes a selection of my work going back over 35 years. It is regularly updated and evolving to include both new and older paintings.
Background to the work
Most of the work relates to my daily visual experience. I usually paint from photographs I have taken. In making paintings from these I am seeking to recover a memory of something I saw and what I felt about it. I am also motivated to depict elements of contemporary life that are not often treated in painting, inspired by a quote attributed to Plato: "A thing is not visible until it is seen". Painting has an important role in making things seen.
Living in a city I am affected by the urban environment around me, and for over twenty years my paintings have been a celebration of London's street life and diverse communities. I am interested in social and cultural expression in public space, and civic life in cities. I have also travelled extensively in Europe, Latin America and India, which gives my work an international perspective. In recent years, I have become more explicit in asserting and writing about the social context of my paintings, opposing insular, exclusionary and divisive tendencies in UK politics and society.
Although the starting point for the paintings are my own snapshot photographs, my painting technique mixes a loose, improvisatory working method using liquid paint on boards/canvases laid flat, with a basic grounding in years of painting and drawing direct from observation.
Painting is a paradoxical mix of slow and quick processes. I find my visual experience sinks in slowly before I am ready to make a series of paintings, but then once I start on a painting I work quickly and keep it fresh. There then follows slow reflection on whether the painting is working and what it needs. I may dwell on a painting over a long time before coming to a point where I resolve it.
Whilst there are unifying concerns across all my work, I tend to think of the pictures in groups in which individual images relate to and re-inforce each other. This was particularly the case with the "A Place to Live" series, which were painted to be seen together, and also the Inverse Colour paintings, a set of critical experimental paintings that were initially a response to the specific contexts of Brexit and the pandemic, but continue to open up a strand of enquiry for me about how painting relates to the world.
In all representational art there is a gap between what is depicted and how it’s depicted. Painting continues to exert a powerful fascination for me, in opening up this unfathomable gap.
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