PLACES TO DISCOVER PAINTING
My ability to create art was first realised growing up in a large family in North London... I always felt the need to find my own space and drawing and painting developed naturally out of this. I enjoyed painting outdoors and often found solace in the local woods near Highgate and along an abandoned railway line at Crouch End. There was a sense of adventure and discovery but also a quiet unnerving feeling in seeking out hidden, off the beaten track places. I also took inspiration from other unlikely sources such as coach journeys out of London on the motorway (I vividly remember passing brightly lit retail parks and underground stations... subjects which continue to inspire me today).
It is this experience of everyday places - environments that are in a continual state of change and contingency - that I strive to represent in my landscape paintings. Backlands, abandoned tracks, local high streets, urban clearway, parked vehicles are all common motifs in my work and they continue to evolve and be replaced over time. I am inspired by Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet (with their recording of contemporary life and changing light in localised places), 20th Century American painters Edward Hopper and Richard Diebenkorn plus modern day landscape artists such as Danny Markey.
A VISION OF THE CITY
For a London based painter like me there are so many great viewpoints and locations that I can discover, it is not difficult to find the familiar and unfamiliar juxtaposed together, for example imposing Shard or Canary Wharf skyscrapers, visible from long distances across the capital, seen 'propped up' by unassuming residential streets and shops.
I work predominantly outdoors but I also enjoy creating studio based art as it allows me to work more readily on a larger scale and experiment. The medium of choice for me is acrylics as they have a clean, modern quality that helps me to capture the brittle unnatural colour of artificial lights and materials of contemporary settings. For night time painting I use a special light adjustable LED lamp attached to my easel, which shines a natural white light - very useful when painting orange lit streets!
At Roy’s Art Fair, OXO Tower Wharf 2019