“Everything starts with the figure. Observing people inhabiting the space around them, interacting with others or in isolation. Wherever I am I have a sketchbook, a phone, a camera and my imagination. I make notes, drawings, stare with an eavesdropping eye. In some sense therefore my figures are real, they are born from reality; in another light they are as fictional as the characters a child might see in the clouds, their identities created from an imagined narrative which is often left open for the viewers interpretation. To me the head and body are separate entities, the one created to carry the other around. The movement of the body and its positioning makes certain statements about character, society and self, although such statements are created and exist in the head alone.
The figure observed, the environment it moves through, the medium used all claim their space, the hierarchy of which changes in each artwork. Landscape is a loose framing of the figure on the pictorial ground. This may simply be a painted suggestion or may include specific detail that has captured my eye; a weed growing in the crack of a wall, waves creating a game, graffiti on buildings, light on water, all of it a play between human and natural. Such a play exists within the nature of painting itself at the point where expression and instinct take over from learning and control.
Every piece begins with an idea but I have no idea where it will end. “