ABOUT

I’ve drawn or painted more or less all my life, with a childhood dominated by artistic activity, most of it through my own motivation. Several things led to this. My father was a headmaster who actively encouraged the arts as a form of education, which was unusual at the time. Also, we had no television and few other outlets for creative leanings, so early on I became acquaint with the need to generate my own momentum.

Being an artist is a fairly solitary life so the ability to be self motivated as a child has come in useful ever since. I studied at Edinburgh College of Art, getting an honours degree in Drawing and Painting. I learnt little about art but a lot about myself. I kept painting, indifferently at times, but my work changed when I came across the paintings of the Canadian artist Tom Thomson, one of the ‘Group of Seven’. Since then I have painted in many remote parts of Northern Scotland, always carrying boards and canvases with me, not usually sketching but doing full scale paintings.

Once back in the studio, detached from the moment, they are reworked, manipulated, altered. Sometimes even left alone. Anything to make them work. I exhibit in a small selection of galleries. The Kilmorack Gallery, Browns Fine Arts, the Rendezvous Gallery, and Panter and Hall. My principal outlet for expression is landscape, but image making is what appeals to me, so portraits and other stimuli often appear in my work.

Tom Thomson

Many aspects of my paintings have also been fed by an ongoing admiration for Canadian artist Tom Thomson. His nocturnes, birches and monumental skies are all elements that reappear in my work. My beech nocturnes, partly attributed to the children’s programme In The Night Garden, are also indebted to the immediate effect