I’m often asked how I choose what I’m going to paint and what inspires me to do so.

And there are two main answers from me here…

How do I choose what to paint? Well, this is customer oriented. By this I mean that I paint the scenes, animals or other subjects that resonate with my customers. We all like to have artwork that can evoke powerful memories of happy times in our lives – this could be a particular animal, place or sport, for example. It helps us to ‘feel’ a certain way.
What inspires me to create it? Ok, this is a little bit different and slightly trickier to answer. I’m inspired by transient beauty in terms of things like light, shadow, natural movement and form, colour, reflections, patterns and texture… All natural, unplanned phenomenon that come and go and must be enjoyed in the moment. We are all hit with micro glimpses of these things every other second of every minute, hour and day. These little glimpses build up and inspire the way in which I create the next painting.
It’s about capturing the moment as a feeling or a memory more than an exact visual representation. This is why I work from the heart in a very fluid and organic way, pouring inky mixes from mid-air. Gravity has as much to do with the process as anything…there is energy harnessed as the ink falls from bottle to surface – and just enough of an element of losing control to allow the ink to make its own unplanned marks.
This blend of control and lack of it is where the magic lies. The paintings come alive from this raw beauty and the real energy that is injected into each piece. Each painting is built with natural, organic mark-making and what emerges is a unique set of reflections, shadows, light, colour and energy.

So, the answer is that I choose my subject matter (what to paint) based on what my customers want to look at. But the way in which I create each piece is inspired by transient moments found in everyday life. I hope that what a customer sees in my art is close to what they see in their minds if you were to ask them to close their eyes and think of the animal, place or activity in question. Would it resonate with how their hearts and minds visualise the subject? I hope so.