Artist Statement

I make paintings, drawings and mixed-media work that take the visual language of Renaissance, classical and Flemish art as a starting point, not a destination. Each piece is an homage rather than a copy: a way of asking what a Flemish interior, a Baroque use of light or a Renaissance figure still has to say when it passes through my own concept and my own hand.

I was raised Catholic, and my earliest work grew straight out of that: Christian European iconography, the compositional discipline of the old masters, and light used not only to illuminate a scene but to carry meaning. Vermeer remains a constant reference for me, for his stillness and interior light and the sense that an ordinary moment deserves this much attention. So does Georges de la Tour, whose candlelight and shadow, work like a quiet theology.

Those influences don't stay in the past. I often set them against abstract expressionism, where gesture, texture and the physical act of mark-making push against the restraint of classical form. That tension is the real subject of the work: control meeting instinct, devotion meeting doubt, historical technique meeting a contemporary hand.

The way I perceive the world is part of that tension. I am colourblind, I am losing my hearing, and for years Ménière's disease twisted my reality without warning, at random and often shockingly. For a long time I treated all three as obstacles to work around.

With colour, especially, I found myself constrained by its rules: does this work with that? Am I choosing the right colour? What if it's wrong? Then the artist Wendy Hope told me to embrace it: to show people what the world, and art looks like through my eyes, and let that expand their world rather than constrain mine.

Now my colour choices are meant to liberate. They twist the viewer's reality and invite them to see from another perspective. Freeing myself from the rules lets me focus on what matters: the subject, the story being told, and the feelings being expressed.

The result isn't nostalgia. It is an attempt to keep the discipline and spirituality of the old masters alive inside work that is unmistakably contemporary and unmistakably mine.