Twenty years ago I made a commitment to myself that I would honour a childhood desire to be a painter. I’d had my tour of duty early on in the digital age and had immense fun doing it. But there was a growing sense that paint rewards more than pixels: analogue is innately more mysterious and complex than digital. The birth of my youngest child provided the punctuation for this new chapter and the endless round of the day gave the rhythm to support the determination.
The truth of course is that with small mouths to feed I had little time to devote to this project. Learning to paint with a measure of competence is not a trivial pursuit, it demands many hours of sometimes quite exhausting humility and effort. So as part of the commitment I joined and now run what has become the Dulwich Art Group and School which has afforded me the chance to paint regularly and to enjoy the company of other artists.
Progress is slow but when insight comes it is sweet and well learnt.
What chiefly interests me is painting from life, depicting what I see in as honest a way as I can. For me, at this point, this means representational painting: never forgetting that it is paint that I apply, always remembering the discipline of observation.
If the artefacts that emerge from this process have a quality that appeals to others then that is a fabulous bonus but in a sort of zen way the interest is more in the process than the result.