After a long, successful career in the visual arts as a graphic designer, illustrator and lecturer, I gradually began to make more time for my portraiture and figurative art.
Since I was at college in the early 1980s I have attended, or run, regular life drawing sessions. My main body of work is involved with drawing the nude, and although the majority of my work is in soluble graphite, over-painted with watercolours, I am also experienced in pastels, coloured pencils or oils.
I also paint more conventional clothed portraits in oils, mostly as commissions. I am constantly fascinated by the challenge each subject presents.
At the start of the first lockdown (March 2020) I began a project that involved painting nineteen portraits for exhibition at the end of the restrictions.
I had already started using Zoom by then, for a writing class. The viewpoint it gave me of each of my co-attendees sparked an idea that I could use this technology to record this unusual period of time. I was taken with the odd perspectives I was seeing and the unguarded expressions and gestures on display in the constrained environment.
It occurred to me that I could draw anyone, anywhere, from the comfort and safety of my studio in Swansea and that they would be, in turn, at ease in their home surroundings.
I was delighted to have one of the portraits from this set accepted for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London. I have since won the Neath Open Art competition in 2023 with a portrait painting, and also had work exhibited at the RCA in Conwy, Swansea Glynn Vyvian and Chester Cathedral. I recently had a couple of solo shows - one at Neath Queen Street Gallery and one at the International Welsh Rarebit Centre.
In 2021 I began a sidetrack into landscape painting. I found that once I’d negotiated the uncertainty surrounding the physical process of getting my paints and brushes into a field and back again, the actual painting came easily.
During the frustrating periods when the weather is too poor to go outside to paint, I turn to still life. My latest batch of work is a series of larger than life conker or mussel shell paintings.
