Back story
When I was a kid, I always watched the 6 Million Dollar Man, we all wanted to be Steve Austin. Shortly before my 17th birthday after a near fatal motorbike accident, I found out that getting smashed to pieces and getting put (mostly) back together again wasn’t that cool. After a month in hospital, and many more just trying to walk again, I wasn’t going anywhere fast. I certainly didn’t feel like 6 million dollars and I also found that the NHS don’t do a bionic leg.
After months of recovery, stuck in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere and going slowly mad, I discovered one fateful day, a very old paint by numbers set, long forgotten in the back of a cupboard. Having pursued every other avenue in my limited world to keep my mind occupied I fell back on this. So, armed with an old album cover I wanted to copy, I gave it a go. It wasn’t good.
But there was something, a couple of brush strokes here and there that hinted at some ability. I tried several times more and splashed out on some cheap oil paints and kept going.
When I was able to, I started to travel into town, often visiting the central library. It was there I met the people who would really inspire my painting, Bruegel, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Wyeth, so many incredible artists. Vermeer in particular fascinated me, his careful compositions, colours, technique, so much so, three years after my accident, I produced a copy of Vermeer’s The Art of Painting.
I’ve never stopped painting since then, occasionally showing work in galleries, group shows, Art fairs, taking on commissions, producing copies to further my knowledge of artists and often, just for my own satisfaction. Painting, and by extension, drawing, colour and composition got me to college, to working in design and then to teaching. It’s been a gift.
Fast forward to today, I’ve had the privilege of working with and teaching some incredibly talented people, both artists and designers, and some amazing students who’ve genuinely changed my worldview through their positivity, kindness and talent.
I enjoy a busy home life with my family and still love teaching and with my studio nearby, hope to move more into full time painting as soon as I can.
Why I paint what I paint
When you get a real passion for a subject, you can’t get enough of it, not just the artists and their work, but their life stories too. I bounced around from Renaissance & Baroque Art to the Dutch masters, the Pre Raphaelite’s to the great figurative artists and illustrators of the early 20th century.
In addition to creating a copy of Vermeer’s ‘Allegory’, I made several copies of other pieces, it was a great learning curve and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was taking part in a longstanding part of Western artistic education. Outwith the techniques I was learning, I also gained an enduring admiration for the beauty and craftsmanship of the work, no matter the subject.
As the great Roger Scrutton said "The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was 'beauty”.
