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Looking back through the faltering false starts of a dozen ill-conceived blog posts, I realise that the last time I wrote with any regularity about my work, and about my life as an artist, was the first and only time in my post-art-school career that art was – briefly – all I did. When, two […]

    There are two magpies strutting about on the lawn as I write this long overdue post; a pair – which signifies joy. I can believe it, too, because just behind them – sitting squat and solid on this cold December morning – is my recently completed art studio. A year ago, this view […]

When I finally gave up my studio space in Hackney, after almost 20 years of happy habitation, I knew that it would be greatly missed. For the first ten of those years, my small bolt hole in Victor House became much more than just a place where I went to work. I ate there, read […]

I spent an hour last week stripping the paint from a very heavily-worked canvas: a painting which had been in production for so long that I couldn’t really remember starting it. As I worked my way back through the layers, I began to recognise aspects of a previously ‘finished’ painting that I had obviously decided […]

  I can’t remember when I realised that anyone could submit a picture the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, but once I did, it only took me three years to actually get around to doing it. I had a piece selected for the show back in 2011 and was delighted to sell it on the opening […]

The writer and critic Cyril Connolly once said that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. This is why, as an artist who is also the main carer for two small children, I am so pleased that Malcolm Maclaren invented the pushchair. I’ve been working as an […]

When I moved to London back in the mid-90s I did all sorts of jobs in order to pay for my first studio. I’d worked in a pet food factory in Suffolk for 4 months after leaving art school, so I really wasn’t fussy about how I paid for paint and a place to work. […]

Although it often doesn’t look like it, I’ve always considered myself to be a landscape painter. At art college I was interested in the vibrant aerial imagery of Peter Lanyon and the thickly textured abstracts of Nicolas de Stael. Their influence led me to produce some surface-heavy, structured landscapes of my own, although I was […]

  I’ve always found that I work best with a deadline to meet so, when Broadgate Estates contacted me in late December, inviting me to put on an exhibition in The Broadgate Tower, I decided to use the show as a-very-good-reason to do a lot of the things I’ve been meaning to do for a […]