About me and my painting

Welcome to my website. I’m a self-taught artist with a passion for painting in my spare time, particularly football themes and urban landscapes, but love variety so I try other themes too.

A special thing about painting for me is the way it encourages a strong awareness of the world around us, creating a drive to seek out the beauty and the unusual in our everyday surroundings. “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it” (Confucius). I’m fortunate to live in a richly varied area in Wallasey, on the northeastern tip of the Wirral peninsula. With open skies and sandy beaches on the Irish Sea coast, and the everchanging light and movement along the Mersey as I walk to work, there is no shortage of inspiration.

I’ve painted as long as I remember, and remember being thrilled when I won a painting competition in our local Fine Fare supermarket when I was about 9 or 10! I studied art at secondary school, but then focused on a career in the sciences and education and have worked at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine since 2014.

I continued painting into my mid 20s, but then it fell to the side when children came along, but have picked it up again enthusiastically since the Covid pandemic as a hobby alongside my full time job. So my portfolio is now growing again and I will be adding new work regularly to this site in the coming months and years.

I prefer painting in oils.  Often people perceive oils as one of the more difficult mediums, but it offers enormous control and flexibility far more than any other form of painting.  Paints are rich with wide variety in colour and transparency, and different mediums can be used to control how the paint behaves - drying fast where lots of detail and layering is needed, thinning the paint with liquin or solvent. Or drying slow where lots of blending is needed, thinning paint with oils like safflower or walnut.

Usually oil paints build up in layers and I love the learning processes and techniques of painting in oils. Each painting demands it’s own approach to building up the work, which choice of medium to use, and the technical challenges along the way. So in my blog posts I share these learnings which I hope other aspiring artists may find useful too!