I was born in Hertfordshire in 1954 and grew up on the South Coast and in London. Always drawing as a child it was natural that, on leaving school, I would go on to Art School. I studied at Twickenham  (now Richmond) School of Art and Design and was taught by the maverick painter Stan Smith.

 

I pursued a career as a freelance Illustrator and Designer, establishing  my own Design consultancy in Richmond in 1985. In the early nineties, with computer's muscling in on all areas of design and illustration and replacing the use of traditional skills, I took the decision to give (almost) all of it up and move the family to deepest, rural France to be a painter. Whilst illustration commissions continued, I established a reputation locally as a landscape painter, with successful one man shows in Bordeaux, Bergerac and Perigueux. I also found myself in demand as a teacher, soon acquiring  25 students of varying ages and abilities.

 

In more recent years, having returned to England, I have written and illustrated two award winning children's books and devoted myself to developing as a painter. Recently I have turned more and more towards Still Life where I find that, as I observe a still life grouping with ever deepening intensity, I am bringing to the genre my years of experience in depicting both landscape and figures. My adherence to strict accuracy in drawing and modelling means the grouped objects become as a landscape, with depth and atmosphere revealed through the play of light across forms that are all set within a plane.  And in pursuing meticulous fidelity to  form, texture and colour I find myself  facing all the challenges of a portrait painter, concerned with surface but trying all the time to say something deeper about the subject before me. To turn the familiar into something extraordinary.

 

I have taken a great deal of inspiration from studying the Dutch Stilleven artists of the 17th century but I also find myself returning again and again to the works of Andrew Wyeth, whose interiors, landscapes, figures and still life paintings captured light, texture and, above all mood and atmosphere, almost entirely through the most obsessive and meticulous draughtsmanship.