"I am a self-taught artist, having previously worked in the design and print industry for most of my life and painting in my spare time. My subject is inspired by what's around me - particularly people and the streets of my hometown, Bath. When I walk or travel, I typically take numerous photographs and like to browse through them upon returning home, looking for that unique moment captured. Narrative is important to me, which led me to a personal recent project on people's obsession with mobile phones.
My working process is to experiment with my source photos and look at various visual possibilities. I then up-scale onto the canvas and paint an umber underpainting to sort out the tonal values before the final colour version. I nearly always work in oils on canvas for the bigger paintings - the smaller work is done on MDF board. In a recent series I called 'Negative Space' I used positive and negative areas to select viewpoints to control how the viewer sees and responds to the image".