The photo shows me working on a a 16' x 12' backdrop of a fantasy garden for the Deep End Theatre Company production of WOMAN IN MIND by Alan Ayckbourn in July 2010 Directed by Nick Mazonowicz

Born 1966, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire I graduated with BA in Fine Art Painting in 1990. Since then in addition to various day jobs I have continued to produce and sell pictures in various media. As a student my work was informed by CG Jung and Martin Heidegger, from them come the themes that unite my work in various media; identity, time, environment and decay. My paintings are concerned with mythologies and palimpsests, with the faint signs left by the passage of history.
Although coming from a fine art background influenced by initially by surrealism and later 80’s Neo-symbolism I find my paintings now often have a gothic or fantasy atmosphere. This move towards a more illustrative style has come from my own work as a creative writer and collaborations on illustrative projects. I often draw upon my current interest in literature, science and history for imagery.

The traditional multi-layered approach of painting itself utilises a physical analogue of geological stratification: I try to synthesise painting’s technical and symbolic aspects. My larger acrylic paintings are constructed from layers of impasto and scumbled white with thin glazes. I erase, cut back, sand down and rebuild; stratified paint serving as an analogue for the growth, flux and decay of boundaries between identity and environment.
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Acrylics on Canvas

The subjects of the ‘Statues’ series were adapted from various classical sources. I decided to use the statues in my paintings as a recognisable human form, subject to historical scales of time, cut from stone: the material of its own environment, partly overgrown, encrusted with lichen and worn by the weather as it merges once again

All these images as they all have been through various stages and degrees of digital manipulation and therefore do not exist as unique objects. Several have been used by publishers or produced in association with other writers. Because of the non-permanent (or virtual) nature of the media employed I have produced them quite quickly; for the story ‘Basilisk Soup’ I completed all ten illustrations within a week.

Although similar to the illustrations, these are painted in permanent media.

Pen and Wash
These are painted on watercolour paper, many incorporate marbling and take up to a month to complete, utilising many applications and removals of masking fluid to keep the forms from becoming resolved. The paintings are composed of many layers of palimpsests: again an archaeological metaphor. Several of these are based on sketches of particular locations and the sense of embedded history these places possess. They are mythical landscapes laid over real locations; poetic approaches to a history whose value depends upon emotional resonance rather than empirical verification.