"Condemned" Painting

I hail from Whitby, in England: an ancient, northern port sandwiched between the brooding North Yorkshire Moors and the tempestous North Sea. This is important because, just as Whitby is small yet rich in historical (Synod of Whitby, Captain Cook, Victorian jet) and literary wealth (Dracula, Alice in Wonderland), so the size of this my work (A5/A4) belies the wealth of detail they contain. In fact, these small monochrome artworks may well be unlike anything you've seen before and it for this that they generally elicit dramatic reactions from viewers. Their inspiration is drawn as much from the northern heritage of an artist who can claim British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Scandinavian roots as observations of contemporary society and culture. Thus you are just as likely to see Celtic knotwork, demons and angels as you are Spongebob, Star Trek or C19 masks and needles: the result is a veritable smorgasbord of imagery that demands to be seen.

The art practice goes back a long way. Ever since I was at school and could get away with it, I could be found decorating the pages of my schoolbooks with comic characters, spacecraft and strange creatures inspired by the sci-fi and fantasy worlds of Dr Who and Blake’s 7, Space 1999, Star Trek and Star Wars, Narnia and Middle-Earth, Dungeons and Dragons and 2000AD, that wonderful cult British comic: it was in its weekly pages that my younger brother and I discovered Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and Slaine through the amazing artwork of Alan Moore, Mike McMahon and many others.

The doodling continued through the years and still today, I continue to be inspired by anything and everything: people, history, popular culture, the conflicts within our daily lives: light and dark; life and death; imprisonment and freedom; censorship and expression and the relationships between them. All of these meet somewhere in my head and eventually find their way out, through my pen, onto the paper and through the medium of the internet, to you today.