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I make paintings based on my observations of built environments and the memories I have of places I have lived in or have been to.
More specifically my work focuses on housing or accommodation. Usually the subjects are basic in form and often located in or on what are known as public housing schemes or council estates.
I was born in Birmingham, England in 1963 and grew up in the Alum Rock, Kingshurst and Chelmsley Wood areas of the city before I left to study Fine Art in Sunderland (1983 – 86). Whilst in Sunderland I painted views from the college windows and from the bedroom windows of the bed-sits and shared houses I stayed in. During my MA studies at Coventry from 1999 – 2001 I painted pictures of shut down Birmingham pubs that I had known whilst growing up.
Before, in between and since these periods of academic study the pattern of my production has fluctuated between two ways of working. One way is producing paintings purely from memory; starting with an idea in a sketchbook and developing it through a process of seeking a satisfactory composition, combination of colours and surface or finish while working on the canvas. The other way is working from photographs. Photos are taken whilst driving around (usually within areas within British towns and cities) from which an image is selected. The image is then drawn out on to the canvas and the painting developed by the applying as many layers of paint as necessary to achieve a conclusion without changing the original compositional drawing.
I am currently trying to make the results of the two types of painting methods appears more similar by tightening the finish on the memory-based works and making the photographic based ones more loosely related to their sources.
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