About me
I am an artist working in the UK. I come from an immigrant family which means that I don’t belong where I came from and I don’t belong where I’ve ended up.
This gives me a unique objectivity and enables me to filter what I see around me to provide independent insight without the weight of tradition and belongingness - or rather, it helps me create my own tradition and belongingness - my constructed folklore.
I work in digital media including video and illustration, oil paint and collage.
My art is as much about doing and thinking as finishing or achieving. I enjoy the possibilities to layer meaning and the variety of surface and image that oil paint and digital media provide.
You are invited to browse my website to find out more.
To view my work on canvas, board, paper and digital media, click on the “Shop” button in the right hand corner of the Home page.
You can also read my blogs and view stop motion videos below.
Stop motion + Collage = your most bizarre thoughts visualised.
I love the idea of juxtaposing things that really don’t go together to see what happens. Stop motion video using Dragonframe and a camera on a tripod enables you to do just that. The outcome is sometimes funny (as in humourous) and sometimes just funny (as in bizarre or strange). These videos were produced quite some time ago so the quality is not great but I hope to do more of this type of work soon.
Blog posts …
Nostalgia - Memories evoked by objects
I am currently working on a new body of work that explores the power of objects to evoke memories of the past.
Nostalgia comes from the Greek words “nostos” (return as in Odysseus’s return home) and “algos” (pain). The Greek meaning involves suffering evoked by the desire to return to one’s place of origin. All through Odysseus’s journey home he longed for the things and the people he would find waiting for him. This feeling sustained him through all his adventures, but when he eventually got home things weren’t as he had hoped.
Psychologists have examined the role of nostalgia in the human brain. See, for example an article published in The Psychologist, the trade journal for the British Psychological Society: “Nostalgia - from cowbells to the meaning of life”. It has been described as a compensatory mechanism to protect individuals against the deficiencies of belongingness. As Ian Sinclair says in “Lost London” it may involve “holding on to a past that never happened.” In this sense, memories involve creating rather than recreating the past. Memories for me involve creating my own personal folklore about my origins to compensate for my feeling of being an outsider where I have ended up.
As a child of Irish immigrants growing up in Britain in the 70s I was very much seen, through the prism of the IRA bombings, as an outsider. We were Catholics in a Protestant eco system, we were a potential threat, we were viewed with suspicion. Yet, on our return trips to Ireland in the summer holidays, we were seen as “the English cousins”, we were also viewed with hostility because British involvement in Ireland’s past was still very raw and ever present.
Even now I still feel like an outsider in both Ireland and the UK but I have created my own belongingness through the objects that my mother and father left behind them and childhood possessions which I have kept. These are family photographs, often from generations before I was born, ornaments that my mother collected such as Staffordshire flatbacks, silver objects, my great grandmother’s sampler, teddy bears and dolls. These have an ability to transubstantiate into my story, my origins, my belongingness.
Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”
My latest painting “Fire in the Farmyard” was inspired by stills from the film “Andrei Rublev” made in 1966 by the famous Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky. People say that he used the film as a vehicle to express the pressures and limitations faced by artists living in a totalitarian system. Tarkovsky said of the film: “An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world. This is the issue in Andrei Rublev.” What particularly struck me were the images of horsemen and horses set against a bleak landscape - it is set in medieval Russia. I started off with some carbon ink brush drawings of horsemen and horses based on stills from the film. Although I think the horsemen I initially drew must have been Tartars, they morphed into Russian Orthodox knights showing the cross of Cyril and Methodius (the saints who brought Christianity to Russia and Eastern Europe) which has two cross bars rather than the Roman single cross bar.
As an exercise at the Norfolk Painting School Diploma 2024/25 we were given a photo of a bland courtyard with mock classical buildings. The idea was to use this as a starting point to see whether we could employ it as an initial diving board to walk away from the strictures of the image or whether we would feel impelled to stick to the original image. I don’t know why but the buildings in the background reminded me of some of the buildings in Andrei Rublev and that was my diving board moment. It then became possible to imagine those buildings in a Russian farmyard on the Steppes with a horseman arriving suddenly in the foreground brandishing a cross. As I mapped out the picture on the board, the image morphed again to an Irish farmyard with low slung white buildings. Eventually, the image ended up as a lone horse without a rider, no cross and buildings that didn’t belong in Russia or Ireland. What changed everything was the colour choice. I immensely enjoyed juxtaposing pastel colours next to a battleship grey. I also enjoyed creating ambiguity in the background which could show a tree against the sky or could show a blazing fire. I also enjoyed surrounding the horse with a light magenta and suggesting its contours with lines. Originally I included an onion dome on one of the buildings but this changed to a more classical building that could be from a grand stable block or could be a derelict Methodist chapel. I hope this shows how a jumble of images and thoughts can be used to inform the ultimate image and direct random thoughts into conscious decisions about colour, composition and theme.
My next project - Rilke and colour
About a year ago I was introduced, in one of those many fruitful moments when watching content on YouTube, to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. The Canadian book tuber *emmie*, @emmiereads, shared her love of this 19th century poet writing in German and this encouraged me to buy “The Poetry of Rilke” translated and edited by the American professor, Edward Snow. This was my window onto the world of “the poetry of things” - “Dinggedicht”. The goal of this type of poetry is:
“to present concrete objects (or a pictorially perceived constellation of things) with factual precision and in symbolic concentration. This descriptive exactitude results from a process of intense observation that yields insights, often ephiphanous in their overpowering suddenness, into the essential nature of things. At the same time this attitude makes possible the detached expression of inner experiences evoked through contemplative contact with the object … [the poet] renounces an inspirational poesie du coeur in favour of singular images and strives to penetrate to the innermost specificity of natural as well as crafted things as they are transformed into objects of art.” (From Michael Winkler’s “Dinggedicht” in The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 1993).
This is epitomised by Rilke’s poem about a blue hydrangea - “Blaue Hortensie”. The sensibility of a painter is quite clearly evident in the words Rilke uses. He describes the leaves of the hydrangea as “like the last green in the paint pots - dried up, dull and rough”. He also describes the variegated and transient colour of the intense blue in the flower umbels which are likened to “old blue writing paper” which, when wet or exposed to sunlight, develops yellow, violet and grey. The sudden insight of the poet is revealed at the end of the poem when he sees in one of the umbels “a moving blue as it takes joy in green”.
Rilke spent some time in Paris working for Rodin and he also developed a fascination with Cezanne. Cezanne was looking at objects such as apples with the same intensity and investigative spirit. Rilke wrote a series of letters to his wife, Clara (herself an accomplished artist) about Cezanne’s work. The letters suggest a frustration at the inability to put into words what Cezanne achieved through painting. “An apple ceases to be edible altogether. That’s how thing-like and real it becomes, how simply indestructible in its stubborn “thereness”.”
I feel the same frustration (but the other way round) when reading Rilke’s poem about a blue hydrangea. I wonder how it is possible to convey in oil paint that intense observational wonder and sudden insight when looking at an object. I have been trying to get that message across in my paintings of objects remembered from childhood but, in that case, seeing the objects transports me back to certain specific points in my past. The objects have travelled with me into the present while those moments were fleeting and ended almost instantaneously.
This will be the basis of my next project - to try to recreate “Dinggedicht in paint”. Wish me luck.
Origins of Victorian Girl Band I & II
Why do children in Victorian photos always look so solemn? Why do they never smile? I have been researching photographs from the 19th century and noticed that photos were a serious thing. Girls, in particular, appeared to dislike being photographed and looked almost cross.
Move on next to the 2000s and imagine a girl band where the protagonists glare boldly at the camera with what looks like supreme self-confidence. They are daring you to question their dress sense, daring you to ask why they are worthy of a photograph. I like the idea that being photographed in a group gives each individual in the photo more self-confidence. The group dynamic might encourage otherwise shy, retiring individuals to lark about or show bravado. Being in a group or band would enable otherwise awkward people to show their brash side, show that they are “brat”. I get this feeling from the photo of a girl group (image to the right) who are wearing branded clothing in primary colours. They are in your face. Everything about the image suggests a slightly edgy, aggressive confidence (perhaps underpinned by some uncertainty). I particularly like the prominence of platform Buffalo trainers much loved by twenty somethings. Each individual in the group is striking a pose.
Contrast this with the uncertainty and whistful looks of the Victorian photo (image to the left). This contrast intrigued me and led me to wonder how Victorian girls would behave in front of the camera if they were in a girl band. That led to Victorian Girl Band I & II.
I have been looking at the art of R B Kitaj a lot recently. He saw drawing as paramount and his skilful draftsmanship shows through in a lot of his paintings. Something which he transferred over from life drawing was the use of charcoal and pastels to create strong black outlines in his paintings. I have tried to use this technique in these two images to make the individuals in the group stand out as well as to delineate each individual member of the group. I have also borrowed Kitaj’s strong colours but translated into my preferred palate which is more on the pastel side of the spectrum (rather than bold primary colours. It’s interesting that my source photo of the girl group shows those strong primary colours as well). I also got inspiration from Kitaj’s varied depiction of faces. Sometimes he drew faces in detail with great accuracy, elegance and fine lines. Other times his faces are primitive and almost crude. Kitaj also used collage in his images which is something a love to include as well.
As another layer of meaning, if we imagine girl groups, given their young age and probable lack of agency, do you think they are exploited or are they set up to exploit their fans? I imagine a bit of both. Children of an impressionable age are susceptible to being exploited to make money for the people who have “discovered” them. I tried to portray that sense of unease and exploitation in both images, particularly in Victorian Girl Band I where I also referenced Picasso’s “Demoiselles D’Avignon” - the ultimate group of exploited women (prostitutes). Picasso just saw a group of women who were uninhibited and who had a primitive energy. What I see is very different, hence the image of the older naked woman on the office chair - someone who has possibly been exploited but has nothing left to give, nothing worth exploiting anymore.