I am a self-taught painter working primarily in acrylics on canvas and wood panel. My practice balances two strands: commissioned works, often highly personal and collaborative pieces created from client photographs or stories, and my own explorations of light, energy, and place. Both are grounded in the same commitment — to honour the emotional truth of a subject, and to capture not only its form but its atmosphere, the movement that lives within stillness.
My path to art was not straightforward. Trained in law, I spent years immersed in words, arguments, and evidence. Yet the pull of painting grew stronger than the courtroom. The discipline of legal study taught me precision, structure, and a respect for contradiction — qualities that now shape my approach to the canvas. Where law was about building cases, art became about opening spaces.
I work in acrylics for their immediacy and versatility. The medium allows me to build layers quickly, creating depth, light, and texture without long delays. I use brushes of varying sizes for detail and flow, alongside palette knives to introduce sharper lines, scraped-back surfaces, and bolder marks. This combination of techniques gives each painting a physical presence — areas of smooth colour set against passages of texture, gesture, and rhythm. Every layer leaves a trace, even when covered, giving the finished work a sense of history and accumulated life.
My studio in Lanarkshire anchors my practice, but inspiration often comes from elsewhere: the rhythm of city streets, the shifting light of coastlines, the pulse of music. Travel informs my work, as do the fragments of daily life that reveal beauty in unexpected places.
In 2026 I will launch Urban Life, a new series of paintings that capture the contradictions of urban experience — connection and solitude, movement and stillness, vibrancy and decay. This body of work will be exhibited publicly, marking the next step in my development as an artist and opening new conversations with audiences.
Beyond exhibitions, I make my work accessible through limited-edition prints as well as commissions. Each retains the intimacy of being handmade and carefully finished. Commissions in particular are a privilege: a chance to bring a client’s memory, place, or loved one into painted form, to create something that carries both my touch and their story.
For me, practice is the constituent of truth. Each painting is not just an image but the record of an ongoing process — the trial, the error, the persistence, the revision, the moment where form finally meets feeling. I am conscious that the paintings I create will outlive both myself and the subjects they depict. Each work stands as witness and as memory — fragments of lived experience carried forward in colour and form. The blank canvas is never empty: it holds mystery, potential, and the energy of what is yet to be created.