Woodville Road VI Painting

I paint the things I notice when walking my dog from my home in Barnet, next to the last station at the top of the Northern Line and just inside the top of the M25 motorway. It is where the city ends and the countryside begins. I see it as 'The edge of London'. I am most interested in how light effects the way we respond emotionally to a place. I like to walk and observe at the end of the day, when the world appears in shapes of light and dark and much of the detail we are familiar with in the day becomes hidden in the shadows. My paintings rarely include figures. They reveal places visited when everyone is somewhere else. At the end of 2017 I had an exhibition of paintings at the Cass Art Space in Islington entitled ’Suburban Nights’. The series explored the deserted and dimly lit North London suburbs at night-time, with subjects ranging from parks and gardens to building material on driveways. Art critic, Estelle Lovett, described me on the BBC as a 'master of light, an extraordinary skill and an extraordinary eye. He's like an owl’. In 2018 I started exploring the other side of the M25, leaving the suburban streets and entering the fields, muddy tracks and country roads of Hertfordshire; reminiscent of the South Oxfordshire countryside where I spent my childhood. My painting compositions come from photographic montages. They are rarely a true representation of an original scene, but a 'Picturesque’ development from one or more scenes. I paint standing up in all media, with my paper, canvas or board attached to the wall of my studio. Initially I work fast with diluted paint, before working into areas with more of an abstract mindset, moving away from the original photographic resource. My work is often referred to as cinematic, atmospheric and mysterious. Although inspired by many painters from the present day and the past, the greatest influences on my work have been film makers such as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, and photographers such as William Eggleston, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. I'm a regular exhibitor at the Bankside Gallery, the Mall Galleries and at the Royal Academy and I'm an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society and a member of ArtCan.