About Me

Whilst occasionally my work does touch on the more obvious manifestations of oppression and violence (I am haunted by certain images, a German firing squad shooting a group of Italian peasants, an older man holding a young man’s hand on the point of death) my work more often deals with less obvious or visible contradictions. The spectacle of the city I do find seductive – it is all those clichés: dangerous, vital, sexy, but beyond/behind those facades, the countless illuminated windows, lies this strange artificial environment in which it seems the huge majority of humanity work – the office. Slick and comfortable the modern office conceals the economic and psychological violence implicit in corporate culture. The genial self-satisfaction of the rich and their denial, or refusal to recognise, culpability. Contradiction has always been a characteristic of capitalism, however the recent growth of the super-rich has exponentially increased the scale of economic contradiction. Twenty years ago the average Director of a FTSE top 100 company earned seventeen times the national average wage in the UK – they now earn seventy-five times the national average.

I want my images to go beyond the limitation of the subject – to speak of ideas contained somewhere between the image, the formal structure, the material and the qualities of the mark. But I am of course always deeply involved in the subject: - the kind of space; the quality of light; above all the figure. I love the figure and in a sense know every figure I make. I may at times draw or paint a figure I feel no sympathy for – who I may regard as representing evil, but far more often I am driven by a love of people and a very deep sympathy for poor suffering humanity.