I have been painting and developing my personal visual language for nearly 30 years. My main pursuit
was to free myself from perspectival conventions and learn to paint the world as I knew and saw it, and to
learn how to paint using colour as a means of expression of feeling and sense of place. So I looked to
East Asian paintings, ancient Egyptian frescoes and decorative ornamentation for inspiration and to the
modernist figurative painters that emerged from the turn of the century. Matisse and Bonnard have always
been very inspirational for me, and their work continues to teach me to be more adventurous and
explorative.
My subject matter hasn’t really changed throughout my painting life, and is predominately still life, interiors
and interiors with figures.
However, my painting techniques have changed a lot over the years and I have moved from working in
egg tempera on board during my college days and for a few years after, to acrylic on paper and board
during the nineteen nineties, to oil on canvas and board from the late nineteen nineties onwards.
Over the last 10 years my style has developed and matured, this has coincided with using oil paint, and
now I feel I can paint with the freedom and expression that I originally set out to achieve, in both subject
matter, colour and the textural qualities in the paint itself.
