About My art
My background in painting and creativity as a whole has had a solid art school foundation. I started my introduction to art late 70's, to do an art foundation course in Epsom. What an eye opener that was!
I then went to study at Chelsea School of Art and Design for 3 years to do Stained Glass. A wonderful few years to explore the textures, the fluidity of glass and transparent materials. The course encompassed etching, sandblasting, copper foil methods of glass working, glass painting, and also the full completion of stained glass projects from initial concept to final installation of a panel, in both exterior and interior environments.
After leaving Chelsea, I decided not to set up my own Glass studio or to work with a major stained glass company. So I started work as a junior graphic designer and spent the proceeding 5 years,building a graphic design career.
However after being made redundant in 1993, I decided to use my redundancy money to reinvent myself. This was when multimedia and the Internet was just getting off the ground and I wanted to be on the roundabout. So I applied for a Multimedia/Graphic Design course at University of Westminster and spent 3 years exploring hypermedia and cyberspace. I wanted to become part of the new web technologies, which were evolving at break neck speed.
During the past decade, I have returned to my roots in fine art painting and in between my full time jobs as a web / graphic designer, I do portraits for competitions and commission.
I enjoy the contrast in medium to create realistic portraits of my selection of sitters. I find the face a fascinating object as it is so changeable and it is nigh impossible to capture all of ones personality in one painting. Sometimes a tryptych is needed to capture the elusive element called personality or the essence of ones being.
I search for the elusive quest as in 'What makes up a person?' I hope to capture a facet of a person and every painting is a exploratory quest,to find out about the person I am capturing on canvas.
