showcase your art to thousands
of visitors every day

The characters that inhabit my paintings appear quite pathetic creatures, although striking poses inspired by old masters, ceramic figurines, and vintage Hollywood glamour, they are perpetually on the cusp of allure and beauty, and somehow always fall short. They are made inadequate from the start, painted from small-scale models that I have made, and consequently not totally believable as 'real'. The environment in which I choose to place these diminutive figures helps to further heighten this unreality. Illuminated by artificial light, and often viewed from above, I have playful control over their constructed world. Sparsely populated sets are fabricated from materials such as paper, silk, clay and plastecine, selected for their contrasting and evocative surfaces that will then translate into the painted realm.

When these models are depicted onto canvas and are enlarged in scale they become indefinable, and slightly redundant, not so benign as to be dolls yet too stylised and roughly proportioned to be human. There is something desperate however about these poor creatures that are unaware of their physical distortions. Their striking faces stare wantonly, sometimes from beneath outsized bows, attached to malformed, dysfunctional bodies. They are forlorn but showy creatures steeped in pastiche, frivolity and contradiction. Grown listless with the heavy monotony of their lifestyle and hopelessly moored by inactivity, they are caught in uncertainty, and victims of their vanity. These characters are almost becoming self-portraits, mirrors of my own disbelief, idleness, hopelessness, shyness, humour, aspiration, and pretence, a catalogue of characteristics that suggest human frailty.

At the Pool

2006

Winter Coat

2006
Oil on Canvas

By the Light of the TV set

2006
Oil on Canvas

Animal Lovers

2007
oil on canvas
152x122cm

Just Me and My Dogs

2007
oil on canvas
122x91cm

We Are Family

2007
oil on canvas
152x122cm

In The Dark, Dancing

2007
oil on canvas
122x91cm

Cut Your Hair

2007
oil on canvas
91x61cm