I currently paint in gouache, on paper. It allows me to explore my love of collage but create my own characters, and thus, my own narrative. Whilst my paintings have been described as a take on the Japanese idea of the ‘floating world’, for me they owe more to the philosophy that all phenomena are mere appearances to the mind, that ‘colour’ and ‘form’ are merely imprinted in this life, and ultimately do not exist outside the mind that perceives them. Add to this, images from Egyptian, Greek, Tibetan, and Celtic mythology, the Druid tree of life and its cyclic year, the paintings then become a metaphor for a world in transition, an expression of that ungraspable moment where biological forms interact with images from popular culture to give a dialogue to the journeys within this human life, and beyond.
The works of Alan Davie, Yayoi Kusama, Niki de Saint Phalle, Hieronymous Bosch, and Paul Nash have had the greatest impact on my own pursuit of expression.
This relationship between colour and form in my paintings has equal importance: it’s about how they interact on paper; it’s their combined story; and ultimately, it’s about the actual craft of painting.




