I’m so proud! I finally put up a brief overview of my career on the ‘About’ page. I found it really difficult to condense the last couple of decades into a few paragraphs and quite odd writing about myself in that way. I tend to be very productive in any area I commit myself to and I also tend to be involved in several things at once, so there was a lot to cover. I realised at the end I had skipped huge chunks of my story. Never mind, I think it’s good enough and I want to continue to practice what I preach and not procrastinate because I haven’t created the ‘perfect bio’.

In this post I want to write a little bit about my creative process. Firstly, I draw compulsively! It ranges from absentminded doodling on any surface available and unconscious drawing during meetings and any type of learning environment, through to drawings that are a final art piece if you like. I post a lot of my drawings on Instagram and have started to put a gallery of drawings together on this site. ( again, not perfectly) 🙂 The images that look like rough sketches are often the ones that I turn into paintings. They’re unfinished and are a shorthand of ideas that are enough to capture the essence and can be expanded on later with further drawings or developed on canvas.

I paint in two main ways. One that is intuitive, where I start without much of a concept and let the painting process evolve through layers of paint. The images come from the act of playing and working with the medium. Images appear from the canvas, to be refined and a mental dialogue occurs that directs the painting. It’s like an active meditation or a direct link to the subconscious. It’s fun and for the most part spontaneous, at least in the initial layers.

The other way I work is to use my drawings and sketches to inspire me. I might use elements from several sketches or simplify just one and create a painting from that. I am constantly reading and learning about whatever fascinates me at the time and these fascinations as well as life long themes become symbols and metaphors within my work. My paintings are my joy and my therapy, they make perfect sense to me and express things I don’t have words for. Though they are obviously personal, I hope that they can be enjoyed by others too and I don’t like to get to prescriptive with their meanings. Though I’m happy to provide their meaning to anyone who is interested. I think each person responds to a painting differently because of their own unique perspective and while some themes are really obvious to me, I enjoy and can be inspired by other people’s perspective of my work. In the end, If there is something in them that you can take away with you that somehow inspires, then that is enough, my work is done.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my site.

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