October
2025 Oil on Canvas 130 x 90cm. nfs.
Mike’s Garage
2025 Oil on Canvas 122 x 91 cm. £1,500
Mikes’s workshop is full of the tools, materials and accumulated detritus of a lifetime fixing and building things, like the body and chassis of the beautiful 1950 Jaguar XK120 featured in my painting. A skilled engineer and craftsman, he has spent a lifetime developing skills in panel beating, welding and mechanics. He understands how things work and importantly, why sometimes they don’t. This painting is a one off, however, Mike’s garage is rich with interesting and complex shapes, textures and colours – and presents me with fascinating possibilities for further painterly exploration.
Free Fall
2021 Oil on Canvas 118 x 140 cm. £2,200
Forest Cathedral
2020 Oil on Canvas 105 x 121 cm. nfs.
Melancholia
2020 Oil on Canvas 140 x 118 cm. £2,100
I first painted this piece in 2017 and revisited it in 2024, reworking elements as my perspective shifted. The forest it depicts was planted by my mother in the 1940s, when she was a young teenager helping her father—my grandfather, a forester—during the summer months. The figure of the young boy in the foreground is drawn from Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia: he’s shown whittling a branch to build a makeshift shelter, a futile act of protection as a meteor hurtles toward Earth. This haunting image resonated with me while my mother was gradually slipping away from us through the haze of dementia. The act of painting became my own quiet, desperate gesture—an attempt to resist the inevitable, and to navigate the slow grief of losing her.
The trees in the painting grow on a small island across the river from where my mother grew up. I rowed there in 2017 to photograph and draw them before they were felled. I had started sketching but was driven away by mosquitoes and ended up relying on
phone photos instead. Like most of my work, this painting draws on a mix of my own photographs and sketches.
Planted pine forests like this one typically last around 75 years—roughly the span of a single human generation. As I painted, I reflected on how foresters harvest trees planted by those who went before, and sow new ones for those yet to come. I’m grateful to my grandparents for thinking in this way—for planting not just trees, but a legacy that reaches forward to us, their grandchildren and future generations.
Looking Forward (Portrait of the artist’s mother as a young woman)
2020 Oil on canvas 140 x 118 cm. nfs
Trilogy
2019 Oil on Canvas 140 x 118 cm
Red Barn
2017 Oil on Canvas 170 x 138 cm. nfs
Seek and You Shall Find
2018 Oil on Canvas 140 x 118 cm. nfs
Homecoming
2013 Oil on canvas 138 x 118 cm. nfs
Wisley Lake
2013 Oil on Canvas 100 x 80 cm
Feather Fall
2012 Oil on Canvas 118 x 69 cm
Waterloo Sunset
2006 Oil on canvas 138 x 118 cm. nfs