About Me

 Born in London, I now live and paint in Oxfordshire. I have always been interested in painting local landscapes, buildings, seascapes and animals and now I have retired from my previous full time employment I can devote more time to my painting and printmaking.

I am largely self taught, supported by attending various evening classes, life classes,  painting workshops and the membership of local art societies. I am always keen to try new techniques and media. I have exhibited privately in shared exhibitions with other artists in local galleries, in open local exhibitions and in the group exhibitions of Didcot, Wantage, Faringdon and Lechlade art societies. My paintings are in personal and municipal collections in various countries as well as the UK.

Artist's Statement

When painting I aim to capture those fleeting light effects on the landscape or colour combinations that transform a scene and make it special. My subject matter is often the local landscape near my home but I am always drawn to coastal scenes and anywhere with water and/or rocks that I may have visited when on holiday. I tend to produce ‘recognisable’ images but have recently painted some landscape montages that twist multiple views and meld them into an overall image – as Eric Morecambe said “..all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. I tend not to includes figures in the landscape to allow viewers to feel that they own the vista presented to them.

Watercolour is my medium of choice but I also work in oils, acrylics and mixed media – as I feel the specific needs of subject demand or for the challenge of working with that medium/subject combination. I have recently started to experiment with adding text and calligraphic forms into some of my pictures. When printing linocuts I use the reduction technique whereby the finished relief print is formed by printing different layers of colour that are cut and printed from the same block of lino, the amount of lino left to print from reducing with each layer – hence the name. I try to push the process to give what I feel is a painterly outcome, which usually means there will be small variations to each print within any single edition run making each print truly unique.

Biography

As a graduate chemist, I began work in industry studying corrosion electrochemistry. After the birth of my second child, I transferred into part-time work as a school chemistry laboratory technician before moving to the IT field, becoming a Network Manager overseeing a school network and the IT support services team until the autumn of 2014. Painting has persisted throughout and can finally take over as my centre stage activity.