I am not a full time artist. I paint for my own peace of mind, for my own sanity. I stand pretty much halfway between being a scientist and being a creative person. I can take a fairly technical approach to my art and more often, a fairly creative approach to the more technical side of my life.
My art is a way of expressing the things I enjoy. I paint the people and things that:
- make me happy
- make me sad
- make me jump up and down
- make me feel
- make me want to dance or scream
- that simply can't stay locked up inside me.
With art, I start with something that grabs me, that means something to me. It might be a friend, a musician, a writer, an actor, an interesting person I have met or a place I have been. I try to recreate something of the draw I feel towards that person in the artwork. I find that friends and family are the hardest to draw or paint. Somehow, person relationships with my subject prevent me from drawing them. Probably prevent me from being objective, from taking that essential step back from the subject, to be the artist looking in at the subject. With people I know really well, I get frustrated that I can't fully express the nuances of their personality that I know are there. With someone more distant, there is a filter that allows me to take the subject and reduce it down to the bare essentials of line and shade. To the black and white that most of my work is made up of, although, recently I have been experimenting with reintroducing colour to my work. I live in a very Technicolor world and used to involve a lot of colour in my work. I filtered all of this out when I started to concentrate on portraits. It was a way to teach myself something I was never that great at, portraiture. I still can't cope with life drawing classes. I can't reduce the human form to the shapes needed to draw fro life. I am essentially a copier of images. I always start my images with a photograph, one I have taken myself, wherever possible as I know the images I want to create. Sometimes my portraits are created from multiple photographs.
This site currently only includes some of the work I create. So far I have included the portraits but I also write and am currently working on an illustrated story which will end up in a graphic novel format. There are also a lot of works which repetitive geometric patterns which tend to a lot more colourful. These will end up on this site eventually as well.
New projects in progress:
Portrait of Son House
Wrapped up in Love - portrait of Johnny and June Carter Cash