Hello
Firstly, welcome to my website!
I’ve been drawing and painting for most of my life but I really started to concentrate on art in 2022 after my career in insurance came to an end.
Most of my pictures are in acrylics and many feature the sea and landscape of the Isle of Wight, where I’ve lived since 2001. It’s a wonderful place to live and there are lots of great subjects to paint.
I’m a member of the Isle of Wight Art Club and joined the National Acrylic Painters Association (NAPA) in 2024. I have exhibited at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight and Kennaway House in Sidmouth and also participate in the Isle of Wight Under the Bed Sale. Rather extraordinarily, one of my paintings (Cow on Culver) was accepted for the 2025 ING Discerning Eye exhibition.
In June 2025 I took part in Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year (Heat 5, Pod 8) at St James’s Park, which aired on Sky Arts on 21 January 2026. This had a huge impact on the way I paint, (which you can clearly see in the 2025 Gallery) because I spent most of the year completing paintings within 4 hours and / or outside.
Until last year, most of my pictures were painted in the studio and I only really started painting outside in 2023. Since then I have come to appreciate the immediacy that plein air painting brings and it’s become more and more important to my art practice. In fact there is a split now between studio work, which takes longer and can be more experimental and plein air work where the focus is often on producing a response to whatever scene is in front of me in a quick and simplified way.
So what pulls the paintings together? Well, colour is obviously important. I like vibrant colours and tend to exaggerate the saturation, plus I’m always trying different ways of applying paint to create pattern and texture. In fact sometimes the pattern and texture are more important to me than the subject matter.
Simplification is also key. Left to my own devices, I tend to overcomplicate things and so I quite often paint in a way that deliberately makes that more difficult. This is particularly evident in the plein air paintings that I did in the second half of 2025 (big brush / small surface). So, there is a constant push and pull between my instinct to interpret what I see in a very detailed way and my need to simplify.
The more I paint (especially outside) the more I focus on creating an immediate response to my surroundings and the less I worry about getting things “right”. I’m looking for a sense of energy and a way to drill down to the essentials of a painting. In 2025 I concentrated on speed and I found this to be a really useful way of cutting out the noise. If you don’t have much time, you really can’t spend it on anything that is not essential. All this is pushing me towards a more abstract approach and it’ll be interesting to see how this develops in 2026 and beyond.
I hope you enjoy looking at the paintings in the gallery section. I plan to add a shop to the website in the future for prints and some originals and may even write the occasional blog post! If you have any questions or any other comments, please get in touch using the contact form, I’d love to hear from you.