"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later"
- Miles Davis

I have been drawing and painting since childhood and started my artistic endeavours largely self taught in illustration during the 1990s, providing posters, logos and design work for many of the SF conventions and events run in and around Glasgow during the mid-to-late nineties.

Living as I do in Scotland, it's impossible not to be amazed by the power of the landscape and constantly changing air to elicit emotion and atmosphere. I wanted to find a way of expressing this through my art, so in 2004 I started training in drawing and painting at the Glasgow School of Art, where I found myself moving into more abstract colour based work. It was there that I was able to develop a spontaneous yet emotive style of my own through which to capture the emotion and atmosphere of mountains and water and clouds and sunlight in both real and invented contexts.

Thematically my work is concerned with transition. A shift in atmosphere and with it the loss of a moment; or the aftermath of that catastrophic change. My approach is to remain very open to chance, and I encourage and embrace ‘happy accidents’ in my work, often recognising and developing them as the very heart of the piece in preference to the initial idea. In this way I explore the relationship between essence and accident, and how one can very often turn out to be the other. Compositionally my focus tends to be the battlelines where colours meet, be they smoothly merged, casually bled into one another, or aggressively juxtaposed.

From a technical perspective I employ a very “wet” approach to acrylic painting which would be more normally associated with watercolour. I use unconventional materials such as cloth, paper, knives and sprays to both apply and remove paint which allows me to build up many ghost-like images on top of one another, each underpinning and influencing the next. Although the initial layers are often invisible in the final piece, I believe they inform the viewer’s experience on a subconscious level, like sub or supersonic frequencies in music.
 

My influences are many and varied; from the atmospheric light of my artistic hero JMW Turner, whose work has been a huge inspiration since childhood, through the late colourfield work of Mark Rothko, to the modern expressionistic landscapes of Scottish artist John Houston. I am also very influenced by music, where I try to convey mood, pace and theme through intuitive colour and texture choices. Like Klee and Kandinsky before, I constantly explore the ways in which these two apparently different artforms can be reconciled.

I have exhibited in Glasgow and in London and my work generates interest from lovers of contemporary and traditional styles alike which is something I am very passionate about. I believe that much of today's contemporary art is too preoccupied with asking questions, and demands effort, understanding and knowledge from the viewer whilst giving up very little in return, which makes a lot of abstract art very distant and inaccessible. Art for me is first and foremost about giving an insight to the viewer, and only asking for their insight in return in order to observe at a deeper, more personal level.

If you would like more information about me, my art or my methods; or to purchase a piece or talk about a commission, please do not hesitate to contact me by using my feedback and contact form here. You can also subscribe to my mailing list to receive information about new artworks, exhibitions and developments on the web site.