oil and acrylic on canvas

CIVIC (2024) and Night Walk (2021)

“My paintings often start with something small — flowers on a walk, the way grass bends in the wind, a change in light that lasts only a moment. I’m drawn to images that shift and distort over time, things that don’t sit still.

I work with a reduced palette, sometimes stripping colour back almost entirely, other times pushing contrast to the edge. Depth comes and goes. Some areas are sharp, others dissolve. Negative space plays as much of a role as the subject itself, creating a push and pull between what is seen and what is suggested. Flattening the background or foreground lets the image hover between presence and absence, holding onto a sense of familiarity while resisting a fixed reading.

Scale plays a role too. A close-up can become something vast. A detail can overtake the whole composition. I think about how images behave when they’re stretched or compressed, how they break down in reproduction. Billboard ads, old VHS tapes, scanner errors. These accidental distortions have a language of their own.

I don’t set out with a fixed outcome in mind. The process is a back and forth — adding, removing, reworking — until the painting finds its own rhythm.”