Although most of my work is oil on canvas, my working process revolves around using photos and found imagery of figures in various landscapes. A self-taught artist and Classics teacher by profession, many of my concepts derive from Classical mythology and culture, for example 'Ruins at Norba'. This painting was inspired by both the 19th century documentary photography of the Roman ruins in Norba, Italy and by the ‘figures in a landscape’ paintings of Peter Doig.

I am fascinated by the effects of light and colour in photographic terms: colour polarisation, the colours and shapes created on old cathode-ray tube TV screens, the blurring of moving images and the moirée effect.

I often put my images through multiple stages of manipulation before painting from them; for example I take photos of paused videos, b & w photocopy, then re-colour as well as using the shapes of sections of cut-up photographs or found images in multimedia compositions.

A painter’s painter, I am equally enthralled by quoting the stylistic features of contemporary painters such as Peter Doig and Kirsten Glass, as well as painters of previous ages, such as Walter Sickert, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

December 2019