I live and work in the North Pennines in Northern England. Involved mainly with studio painting my creative practice also includes working directly in the outdoor world with drawing, photography and environmental sculpture. My primary concern in making art is to respond to and identify with the energy and feel of the world around me by making visual equivalents in drawing, painting and other visual forms.
Drawings are often produced on journeys made for other reasons and sometimes on deliberate research expeditions. I try to engage as directly as possible with the energies of nature by using natural materials such as peat and clay as well as natural phenomena such as rain and wind. These experiences feed into renewed and refreshed insights in the studio creating an evolving dialogue between the imagination, memory and direct sensory experience.
I spent the first 10 years of my adult life working designing and building ships before returning to a teenage passion for painting in 1987 by attending art schools in Carlisle and Newcastle upon Tyne. Since then I have divided my artistic working life between regular exhibiting; residencies in nature conservation, industry, finance and local communities; public, corporate and private commission; collaborations with other artists and writers; lecturing for universities and colleges; art exchanges abroad; teaching and demonstrating in adult education and in schools as well as studying for a practice based Master of Fine Art degree at Newcastle University. A recent major preoccupation has been a series of collaborations with climate change scientists that has taken me to Helgoland in the North Sea, Lapland in northern Finland and the Atlantic Ocean on board a German research icebreaker, following and drawing scientists collecting data from the natural world.