About me

I have been interested in painting since a young age. My dad was a picture conservator who worked from home and was also a painter himself so I got to see a lot of art growing up. I enjoyed drawing at school and chose to study Art and Design at college. I didn't do much painting as I always assumed it was an esoteric lost art and the college offered no formal painting training. I left college during the boom of the internet and ended up studying Computing at university instead of art, choosing to scratch my creative itch through web design.

Many years later, after the birth of my son, my interest in painting was rekindled through the illustrations in the books I read him at night. Thinking this to be an easier style than the Victorian art I was interested in, I began to copy some of the paintings using acrylic ink and paint. I soon progressed onto more realistic and traditional painting and, with some practice and the help of some YouTube videos, I was able to achieve a decent level of realism in acrylics in a relatively short space of time.

Since then I have experimented in acrylics and learned how to really push this modern and flexible medium to its limits.

I still work as a web designer and developer but I am also a prolific realism painter. People commission me to paint their loved ones, their pets and reproductions of old master paintings. I also produce original paintings inspired by my favourite art movement, The Pre-Raphaelites, especially my favourite artist, co-founder Sir John Everett Millais. My painting style is inspired by their aspirations to render the natural world in great detail and to convey the human spirit. My original works combine qualities from several Victorian movements: Aestheticism, Realism and Symbolism.

This means my works strives to, first and foremost, look good (Aestheticism). I also aim to capture an uncontrived contemporary moment from life (Realism) that is analogous to something bigger (Symbolism). I intentionally make my scenes ambiguous so the viewer can interpret them in a variety of different ways.