Meet the Artist
I AM a British-born artist, at home by oceans, enchanted by circuses, fond of shiny black dogs and awed by the mysteries of modern physics. As a "self-teaching" intuitive artist I create images as they present themselves to me, with rarely a preliminary sketch, and am not surprised that my art is frequently considered “Outsider”.
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For sure, I am an outsider to Art schools, scenes and movements, possessed of a daring to leap outside my comfort zone and follow my Muse. She led me from a childhood creating puppet theatres under the spell of a merry-go-round Welsh seaside to my debut as a painter on the Canadian prairies then my own art gallery on a remote Caribbean island where once they hunted whales.
You may wonder, as I am sometimes asked, why my painting style seems inconsistent. Well, I answer, so is Life. I paint it as I feel it. Sometimes my art comes from a place of still calm, inspired by peaceful meditations; the paint then is smooth and silent spirits glide. Other days it may be inspired by a frolicking noisy dog on the beach with screeching gulls and crashing waves – nothing delicate about this day!
.More often, though, the image swims into view with its own distinct energy – is it veiled and mysterious, rough and hurried, blatantly silly ? (for such can be art). I let my intuition guide me - will it be portrayed with thick red impasto, smooth blue iridescence, wet furry blackness, glitter or a golden veil? Is it (a happy day!) all of these perhaps, and more?
The shape of my art shifts too as I travel, soaking up the light and textures of my surroundings and all the wonderful art I see. Into my paintings swam voluptuous golden goddesses from Italy's renaissance, stone mermaids from Vienna's baroque whilst boats sailed and whales breached out of a tropical blue.
Puppets, cod and clowns peopled my work of English seaside summers whilst edges blurred and surfaces fragmented in spiritual awakenings at steamy all-night cafés. Shapes shift, yet a common thread runs through all my work, an element of magic, a mischievous glint in each subject's eye, secretive smiles that suggest their confident knowing of what mystery unfolds, even if the viewer (or indeed the artist!) does not.
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Another big leap now to the green Greek island of Corfu and into my art walked faceless stick figures from Covid's hard lockdown when we hid behind masks and denied our need for flesh and skin as essential human touch was outlawed – but oh, the theatre of the Mind! Lockdown solitude, strange times for us all - a time for poetry and to delight in small things, for me a time for more puzzling about the nature of reality, of love, for indulging my fascination with quantum biology and the origin of Life: "What IS it… are WE?" takes me on a journey from the “all is illusion” of ancient sages, through a unified vibrational vortex of more modern gurus to the unknowable wonders of wave theory and quarks.
“A Circus", I again conclude, as lockdowns end, the slow-motion world speeds up and into my 3D life walks a tiny shiny black dog - a wonderful incomprehensible dream world of smoke and mirrors in which anything we believe can be true, a world through doors that I hope my work opens for you, where we all are the stars of the show, the mermaids, the clowns and the trick pony riders, the dancers with dogs above all, the Magicians.....
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to my Art