My work originates from my imagination or a concept, rather than direct observation. I paint emotions from my life experience around discovery and knowledge, and often invite the viewer to question what they are truly seeing, encouraging a deeper reflection on perception versus impression. I do this through a sense mystery, stillness or conversely movement. I use more realistic motives coupled with abstract ones to create a sense of both reality and the tension of the unfamiliar. Using both paint and printing my own collage papers adds another dimension. I focus on the underlying geometry of the work, aligning myself with some of the 20th Century movements that emphasised form, space, structure and balance, like the Cubists and the Abstract Expressionists.
"Still Scenes" - These intimate scale paintings capture a moment frozen in time. A cinematic stillness, in that charged silent space full of suggestion where something has happened, or is about to. I'm drawn to the moments between moments; the aftermath, the anticipation, the quiet pause where emotion gathers. I think of them as scenes from an invisible narrative - fragments of something larger, unknowable. From my own life experience I evoke emotions of absence, deception or betrayal. I'm less interested in what's happening and more in what's felt: the sense of unease, emotional echo, paradox or ambiguity. This work is about the human instinct to fill in the blanks and how stillness can be louder than words.
Pathways and Journeys
Pathways are a recurring motif in my work. Partly because I live on the South West Coastal Path, and partly because ive always been an inquisitive explorer of new places. My strong interests in geography and history surfaces in this work. The changing of the travellers orientation at different locations on a pathway. More broadly pathways represent purpose, direction, and the passage of time. The path already travelled lies behind, what lies ahead may offer promise, or peril, but is unknown.
"Passing Through" - This landscape series deals with journeying and explores the connection between movement and memory—snapshots of landscape seen fleetingly from a train window. The images are often blurred or distorted, capturing not the reality, but a fleeting imprint of it. It raises the question: what did we really see, and what did we imagine?
"Ways and Means" - These works investigate how we navigate both serene and hostile landscapes. The path forward is often obscured—disappearing over a rise, around a bend, or into shadow. The full picture is never revealed. These paintings serve as metaphors for uncertainty, fear, courage and the unseen journey beyond the canvas.
"Coastal Pathways" - Here I explore the ‘borderline’ between land and sea. The coastal path follows the edge of the infinite sea—a metaphor for freedom, and yet also for how we are continually coaxed along the linear path beyond the next horizon which leads us to another, and another still: a perpetual, and perhaps futile search beyond living life in the moment, for what lies just beyond in the unseeable timeline that is our own lifespan.
