“My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object, and when it happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back-which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a coherent physical object-well, the painting’s finished….my pictures really finish themselves.”

Howard Hodgkin.

Having graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2001 I travelled widely including Greece, Thailand and a year in Australia, before settling in Cambridge.

Travel is often the starting point for my paintings, the heightened sense of alertness when moving from place to place lends itself to gathering images; mental and photographic. Collecting lived experience.

It all stems from a lifetime of visual enthusiasm and a joy at finding the significant in the ordinary.

I received my first camera at the age of thirteen or so and began to document my world. I still use these images from time to time.

The paintings almost always go through several incarnations before appearing ‘complete’ and the hope is that by the end the work still retains some sense of the authenticity of what I started off with.

I am not only interested in the surface I see a painting as an object, a physical thing. As Mary Chapin Carpenter puts it in song it’s “the dirt and the stars”, the fabric of things, how paint moves, being present, the work of it…..finding old surfaces in skips and making them sing.

2023-Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition.

2022-Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

2020-2022-The Daily Postcard Project, The Daily Postcard Project Twelve Months.

2021-Painting in ‘Wish You Were Here’ exhibition celebrating 150 years of the postcard at The Postal Museum, London.

2020-Painting accessioned into the permanent collection at The Postal Museum, London.

2020-2024-Cambridge Open Studios, annually during July.