The driving force behind my work is a belief that figurative, representational art, and painting in particular, is a modern art form, and furthermore is made relevant by the working practises of painters willing to both build on the past, and to push the boundaries of their own art.
In
other words
they should be prepared to take risks and experiment at times, rather
than always relying on a learnt technique.
One
of the central themes of my work has been the depiction of writers,
largely poets, which
was my attempt to steer “the portrait” away from being a largely
commissioned art form whose main purpose is to fulfil the
expectations of the client, to
that of a collaboration between two individual artists bridging the
divide between very different forms of expression.
The
early culmination of this was a one-man exhibition of “Contemporary
Poets” curated and first shown at the National Portrait Gallery,
London.
