I have been painting since an early age, and have developed a unique personal visual language and style of painting that has come from my relationship with the landscape of East Anglia, and specifically the landscape and environment of the Suffolk coast.
This long, haunting, empty stretch of ever changing shingle, sculpted by the wild North Sea, punctuated by isolated fishing communities and the brutal yet iconic industralization of a nuclear power station, eroding cliffs, reedbeds and heathlands, and great big skies, has resonated deeply with me since childhood. It became my escape from the world - where I could be myself alone, and has come to define who I am as a person, and define me as an artist.
My paintings are graphically striking, simplified in form and colour, defined and redefined to the barest minimum, abstracted yet subtle and retaining enough to make them instantly recognisable, and are a response to the stark, raw beauty and sharp intensity of light and colour of the Suffolk coast. My work is characterised by a strong sense of solitude and stillness, which is echoed from within myself, but with strong sculptural subjects and defined contrasts - dark versus light, man-made versus natural, past against present.
The main themes running through my work are the remnants of the Sole Bay fishing industry – the open beach boats and the fishermen who work them, the crumbling cliffs of Dunwich and the sweep of the desolate shingle beach, stretching away to infinity, RSPB Minsmere, and the big brooding abstract block shapes of Sizewell nuclear power stations.
