Art was always my thing as a child, something that I seemed to have a natural eye for and excelled at school at. After completing a double A level in Art I went on to take a Foundation Course in Art and Design at Warwickshire College, before going on to study BA (Hons) Fine Art at Oxford Brookes university.

After graduating from university in 2005, I spent the next decade dipping in and out of many different creative avenues alongside building a corporate career, raising a family and undertaking a large home renovation project.

Things really changed for me back in 2022, when I joined Connected Artists, an artist community headed by Alice Sheridan, and enrolled in CVP, an immersive 12 week course with Californian artist, Nick Wilton. These platforms opened up a whole new community of likeminded creatives, some of which I’m pleased to call friends today.

I gather inspiration from everywhere, but mostly it is from my experience of the natural world around me. I love being in nature and am forever inspired by mother earth, her rhythms and seasons, her simplicity and complexity, her light and dark. As E. O. Wilson said;

“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.'”

It could be an interesting composition or colour combination seen, a nostalgic sensation, or even a distinctive sound.

My paintings become an interpretation of these experiences, a means of documenting them in a way that makes sense to me. Georgia O’Keeffe once said “I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for”, This really resonates with me, using visual elements to express complex emotions and ideas.

I love to build up the layers in my paintings to show the history of the marks, exposing parts of previous layers, movement and expressions. The painting has been on a journey of evolution and growth, at times through murky and messy stages in order to get to a stage of refinement and beauty, much like ourselves.

I aim to create a balance between the bold and the subtle, but the subtle is where I love to play the most, experimenting with harmonies and shifts of colour, texture or detail.