Born in Plymouth, England quite a long time ago now, I attended Brighton Art College in the 80s and went on to work as a freelance illustrator for the next 34 years. I was primarily painting figurative watercolours for book covers and also illustrations for fiction in magazines. Apart from providing me with a decent income , I was also fortunate to have enough spare time to pursue my own artistic endeavours. For quite a few years this usually meant painting portraits. I was always an admirer of the work of John Singer Sargeant and I've included here a couple of my portraits which demonstrate  his influence.

I retired from illustration about 8 years ago and have been a full time landscape painter since then. I still do a few portraits, and paint a few animals, but it is the landscape , or more specifically, the trees, that make me want to paint each day. I now live in the middle of the Balkan mountains surrounded by the forest and have an endless source of inspiration. The overwhelming green of summer has little appeal, but as soon as the leaves begin to change color , I begin to feel inspired and gather endless reference for new work. So, most of the paintings here are autumnal, with the odd blossom picture dotted about.

My style does vary. I can’t seem to paint every subject in the same way. Sometimes things are quite traditional.. sometimes I use a palette knife for a bit of spontaneity and sometimes I feel the need to simplify things and paint more in terms of shape and colour. I’ve never found that one style fits that all.

In recent years the canvasses got larger. I was trying to get that feeling of being immersed in the woods, and the trees needed to be bigger. More grandiose. All well and good if there’s a large wall somewhere to hang the canvas on, but they are less consumer friendly as they need removing from the stretcher and rolling up to send around the world. The client needs to have them re-stretched. An easy procedure but it involves finding a good framers who do this sort of thing. Which brings me on to the current work… the round ones.