Biography

Whilst at school my artistic career was made up of highs and lows. The high being awarded the third-year art prize (to date the only award I’ve received for anything) and the low dropping the subject altogether in my penultimate year.

With art school seemingly not an option for me I decided to make the smart choice for my future and went to drama school instead – to many a distinction without a difference. The irony was that in many ways I ended up learning as much about painting at drama school as I would have had I gone to art school. I came to believe that with any creative undertaking, no matter what the medium you always start in the same place – posing questions in the hope of maybe finding answers.

I try to approach each painting as if it were a single frame in a reel of film. You have to consider everything that led up to this moment as well as everything that will follow it. A filmmaker has thousands of frames to tell his story, the challenge in painting is that you only have one but with no less responsibility to capture the narrative. It’s this unique challenge that makes painting both great fun and at times incredibly infuriating.

We are now living in a more image saturated world than ever but while portrait painting may seem old-hat, unlike a digital effect, painting is to a large extent involuntary and unpredictable. Of course you always start out with an idea but you can never know how that idea will ultimately turn out.