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. Lately I have turned more and more towards Still Life where I find I bring to the genre my years of experience in depicting both landscape and figures. As I observe a still life grouping with ever deepening intensity, the objects, and the space they occupy, become exactly as a landscape, with depth and atmosphere revealed through the play of light across forms, all firmly rooted within a plane.  Whilst my adherence to strict accuracy in drawing and modeling, and my pursuit of  meticulous fidelity to  form, texture and colour, means that 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.