Where does my inspiration come from?

I'm quite an outdoorsy person. Because of this lots of my inspiration for my contemporary art pieces comes from the local world around me. I'm lucky to have some amazing walks on my doorstep and many of my paintings have been inspired by places like "Penn Woods", "Coleshill" and "Hodgemoor Woods".

Beautiful towns such as Marlow and Henley are also closeby, so several riverside paintings have been inspired by those backdrops, where I try to introduce a modern and abstract style to my artwork. In addition the coastline of Dorset has had a big impact on my work.

The Jurassic coast, rolling hills and dramatic headlands around West Bay, Bridport and Lyme Regis are often at the forefront of my paintings, having spent the last twenty five years holidaying around that area. Again rather than portraying a literal, carbon copy of the landscapes, I tend to use colour and large oversized brushes to create abstract, modern and contemporary oil and acrylic paintings, with a sense of movement in the pieces.

I paint from memory. Whether this sounds incredibly unprepared or not, the truth of the matter is I don't tend to do any initial sketches or work from photographs. In fact, for many of my paintings I simply start adding colour to the canvas, with a loose idea of what I want to paint and take it from there. For example a woodland scene, sunset skies or a river scene, from a recent day out. I then turn on some music and start painting, building up the canvas with thin layers of paint.

I regularly have 3 - 4 paintings on the go at any one time. I also work on them continuously over several weeks─ until I feel that they are in a finished state. I generally work with oil paints, which means many of the canvases need time to dry in between building the layers of paint up, so I can often change the direction of the piece as it evolves over time.