"Artist/painter. Amalgamating a
                      conscious surrounding environment
                     with borderline surrealist tendencies"
 
 
Based in Manchester, UK.

My work is narrative based and I'm largely inspired by nature. Human nature and the natural world. I'm a compulsive drawer which serves as the backbone to my paintings and a visual diary.

I grew up in Stourport-on-Severn in Worcestershire. A small toursit town on the River Severn with an annual summer carnival which always coincided with swarms of flying ants. My fondest memories of these early years was rampaging around Hartlebury common, a nature reserve of mixed vegetation. Here I would lose myself for hours searching for wildlife: snakes and newts, climbing trees and exploring the marshes.

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In my youth​​​​ I moved with my family to Lancashire. We lived in a tiny village near Pendle Hill, which is famous for witches and built on ley lines. Here I would spend a lot of time walking in the hills and villages immersed in my own thoughts and it became natural for me when I got home to immerse these thoughts into my drawings.

After finishing art education, I spent many years developing my style and over the last few years my work has started to move in the direction I'm comfortable with and I continue to push forward. I now go rampaging in the woods, swamps and countryside with my own son. 

Common recurring themes throughout my work are love and madness, indigenous cultures and a sense of journey into the unknown. The natural world though is ever present and there’s nothing more surreal than all the weird and wonderful that exists in nature. More recently I’m drawn to the element of growth in the natural world and how over time forms change and evolve.
 

Through sketchbooks I move from one idea to another. A patchwork quilt of ideas taken from my surroundings and observations. I have over time built up a host of characters that often make an appearance in my work and it is through the act of drawing that I develop my ideas for painting.

I begin a painting with a preconceived idea and working title. I may take elements from a drawing, but not to the extent that I'm purely enlarging a drawing onto canvas. I like to see my paintings grow into their own on the canvas. Immersing myself in them over periods of time and changing elements along the way. I build them up in layers and washes and the process of developing a piece becomes a large part of my practice. Weaving themselves around the notion of a preconceived idealism the completion of a painting can often be quite textured in parts with trails of marks and shapes echoing in the background.
 
I'm inspired by the genres of Magic Realism and Expressionism and there is an intended dark humour to my work. This is something that I both like to explore as an artist and wish to communicate through my paintings to the viewer.