Biography

I am a painter based in London, UK. After studying Fine Art at The University of Oxford, I completed The Drawing Year, The Royal Drawing School’s MA level diploma dedicated to observational drawing.   

I returned to teach drawing at The Ruskin and The Royal Drawing School as well as teaching in a range of other settings, including galleries and schools.  I now teach drawing and painting at The Prince’s Foundation Diploma Year.

Besides exhibiting regularly, past exhibitions have included The Lynn Painter Stainers Prize, The Discerning Eye, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and The Ruth Borchard Prize.

Although my work always starts with observation, memory and imagination form a crucial part of my process. My subject matter is taken from the world around me and although it can seem mundane, I’m interested in drawing out the drama of the everyday and somehow making the familiar seem strange. 

Plants almost always appear in my work. Their silent presence often feels more animal than vegetable and the foliage in my painting often takes on anthropomorphic qualities. Many of my paintings explore the relationship between plants and the built environment and the tension between the two. The plants I choose tend not to be celebrated specimens, but any commonplace plant life; weeds, supermarket bouquets and familiar pot plants.

Increasingly I have been pushing the drama I seek out in my observed work to make invented scenarios which explore the ideas around safety and precarity, comfort and fear.   I continue to produce observational drawings and paintings, working from my surroundings in sketchbooks and on canvas.  These studies form the beginnings of ideas which I develop imaginatively in the studio.