Little Egret at the Pier Painting

I would like people to find and enjoy mystery in my work, and in the minutiae of life that inspires it. I hope that my paintings will give rise to questions and unlock new adventures in the viewer's own imagination each time they look. Texture, memory and all the senses play their part in the stories each viewer will bring to a painting. Much of my work comes from being outdoors, walking, travelling by bus or by ship or by train, and the restlessness of the sea. Movement and energy are an important part of my work and of my creative process. I respond in colours and strokes to the shapes I encounter in the urban and natural world. I have realised that my artistic influences are as much literary as they are from the visual arts. Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, peering through the gaps in a blind and seeing ambiguity and images of the imagination, peering through the train carriage windows on a rail journey with Paul Theroux or cycling with Dervla Murphy through unfamiliar landscapes have as much appealed to my imagination and influenced my own visual storytelling as have the seaside rock people of Antoni Pitxot, the tortured textures of Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville, looking through the spaces in between with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth or Jackson Pollock, or the remembered landscapes of Joan Mitchell and the undulating roads of David Hockney. Travel, colour, movement and mystery are always present.