Where to start?

2020 has been a weird year and a tough one, but it did afford me some time and opportunity to get my painting up to speed. I have flirted with too many mediums and too many styles, but finally have found an approach natural to my way of working that plays to my strengths and lets me present the world and painting in a way I want to.

My wonderful wife and assistant, helping to photograph a commission.

Traditionally, artists and teachers extol the virtue of drawing and although I am not a bad draftsman, I have never really loved the drawing process and always found it a stumbling block to what I really love, oil painting. But drawing using oil paints has never yielded the results that I wanted nor delivered the vision that I had.

I also love the creative and imaginative works of many artists - Peter Howson, Yoshitomo Nara, George Condo etc… So certainly adore figurative work and portraiture. And whilst I love working from life, the time needed to produce compositions and complete finished pieces, or even studies for that matter, has been a further obstacle.

Detail of Marc & Rachel: 8 Today - Oil on Canvas 2020

You got to love oil paint - it’s magical!

Drawing digitally was the perfect fit for me and so too was reducing the face and figure into basic shapes before transferring them to canvas, where I could use traditional techniques to produce pop portraits of a range of subjects - in the style of artificial realism.

It’s taken a while but I am finally producing paintings that I am proud of. I think my work is playful yet serious and takes full advantage of the most wonderful stuff in the world, oil paint!