I never quite understood how I could be so crap at drawing. It was a standing joke that my people always had a touch of Picasso about them… in that their features weren’t exactly in the correct positions on their faces. There’s a popular misconception that the more you practise, the better you will get at something, and sure, sustained repetition of something can bring some improvement, but it’s also a little simplistic. If all it took was practice, then I’d actually be able

I supposed it could be considered a kind of natural progression. I was already circling the human/animal hybrid notion back in 2005, maybe even before that. But I wasn’t quite expecting it to take the turn it has. In a way a funding application does make you crystalise a project much more than it would do if you were just working away to see where it takes you. Having to actually get your brain into action to nail down what it is you are really proposing. That’s the hard p

Have you noticed it? That slow, not‑so‑subtle creep away from beauty, colour, and warmth into something flatter, colder… a bit less ‘alive’. It starts quietly, and then suddenly you realise the vibrancy has been drained out of the room…out of the streets…out of our very lives even. I first saw it in fragments. It was there in art, in architecture, in the colours offered for our homes. And now I see it everywhere like a deliberate pattern, a rhythm, a language. A new ‘normal’

There’s a reason I don’t go out of my back gate after dark if I can help it and, if I do have to, I always keep an eye on the woodland….don’t laugh! It’s not a big woodland, just the width of the cottages, but it is a corridor to the much more dense forest just a couple of fields away. Once the light fades and the owl screeches and the dogs become fixated on what’s beyond the yard… I can feel it…something primal.

Something that’s always fascinated me, is how readily people will believe in dinosaurs, but not in dragons. We accept enormous, reptilian predators reconstructed from a handful of bones with almost religious certainty. With posters in classrooms, plush toys in the bed, and CGI tearing across museum screens, but then we call dragons “just myth” and move on. What’s odd is that in the places we store our “serious” knowledge, like museums, textbooks, and documentaries the dinosau

I follow a couple of chaps on TikTok that give out ‘advice’ for artists. Sometimes I think, well that might work if you live in London, but here in the arse end of nowhere, that’s a different story and other times, I think yep ‘toats’ agree… One guy was talking about reducing institutionalised art speak for more realistic language when talking about your work and doing funding applications. I was so nearly on board. You know how much I hate the interrogating, exploring, ju

I have a love–hate relationship with Facebook. Actually, if I’m honest, the love part is questionable...I usually call it Arsebook. But like many artists trying to get work out into the world, social media is the trial by algorithm we have to endure. The platform has changed dramatically in recent years, and not for the better. I post very little on my personal page now, and my art page mostly mirrors Instagram. I can’t be bothered scrolling through endless adverts just to ca

I put the brush down on my latest piece for Portals Divine a few days ago. It was going to be the last piece in the series, but even as I started painting it, I had the feeling something was still missing. Another masculine piece, perhaps…it’s still crystallising in my thoughts. The latest work itself was intended to be something quite different. It started with multiple faces, which turned into a single face and multiple masks, and then, as I wrestled with the concept, becam

When I booked an exhibition space before I'd painted a single piece... Sometimes you’ve just got to say “what the fuck”… and make your move. (Devotees of 80’s films will know that one.) And I did. I booked an exhibition slot before I’d painted a single piece. Not only that, I had the completely unhinged notion of creating around twenty brand new paintings in eighteen months, an entirely new body of work, and completely different from what I’d been making before. So yes, I sa

There’s always a stage in oil painting where the work is not quite finished, but you can’t actually do any more until it has reached a certain layer of dryness. This is especially true if you want to add something sheer, like see-through fabric, or in the case of my latest piece, street lights. So he’s going to have to sit for a few days before the final fling. I think all paintings arrive with some kind of challenge, but this one wasn’t quite what I expected. And the challen

“Oh Edmund can it be true, that I hold here in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green” Lord Percy exclaimed excitedly while holding what looks like a solid lump of snot. It’s even funnier when you remember he was trying to alchemise gold. Blackadder’s response to call him an utter berk was probably the right one, but I get it, though. Because I, too, have ‘invented green’. Everyone knows blue and yellow make green, right? Primary school stuff. But what I didn’t know is tha