Shell Shocked Painting

I am a prize-winning British artist who has practised his art since leaving art school in the 1980s, exhibiting and selling regularly. I paint full time and live in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. I’m driven by the challenge of creating beautiful, impactful objects that 1. provide an immediate and enduring experience and 2. change a space positively by their presence, even when they're not being looked at directly. My paintings explore the dynamic interplay between line, space, and colour, striving for a poetic intensity. Soul in preference to perfection. I consider my paintings, indeed all abstract painting, to be aesthetic machines and like a machine, a painting has a purpose with components that combine in an integrated visual system. Therefore, my challenge is to create compositions with totality, without dominant focal points or visual hierarchies. Every element of the picture must be alive, equally present, equally demanding. Colours working with equal force. Only the essential is included, coming at the spectator all at once. I work in series to explore a specific idea or approach in depth across multiple works. A work from one such series of paintings, Everything At Once #4, was a winner of the Homiens Art Prize in 2025. The paintings tend to have a minimal palette - two to four colours at most - and are small, never exceeding one metre across. They are always square to avoid any resemblance to landscapes or portraits. In addition to composition and geometry, surface texture, such as matt and gloss effects and the thickness of paint, is also an important consideration for me. Painting what I, or no one else, has ever seen is always an adventure and a thrill for me, especially when the results are pleasantly surprising. But a painting isn’t truly complete until it’s on a wall, interacting with a spectator and enhancing a space. Like all paintings, mine offer the spectator a unique and enduring experience - one that, I hope touches the heart as it engages the mind.