I am a self-taught contemporary figurative portrait artist with a focus on marrying together the real and the imagined through an intuitive creation process. With a strong link to connection and storytelling, I look to explore the interiority of my sitters by combining traditional portraiture with illustrative representations of the internal self.

Having written stories my whole life, I developed this interest in a BA and MA Creative Writing degree, the latter I graduated first in my class from in 2016. After graduation, I found myself returning to another, somewhat neglected, love: portraits. I was drawn to the immediacy of communicating through a piece of art. Whilst the creation process can be somewhat lengthy, once made, it is mine to put out into the world. As my work developed, I began to realise a commonality throughout what I was making, and found that my passion was portraits, most often of women, that revealed, or withheld some kind of story. After quietly creating portraits as a hobby in the background, I left my full-time profession in 2021 and was offered a residency at the arts centre ‘The Base’, in Greenham less than 12 hours later.

When I talk about storytelling in my work, I do not necessarily refer to a linear narrative or even the specific story of a sitter. As my work has progressed, I have found myself less interested in specific narratives and more drawn to the idea of storytelling itself, and how this reckons with what it is to be a person.

I am interested in the interior lives of people and the ways in which we connect with each others’ interiorities. I am fascinated by the ways in which these thoughts, feelings, histories and memories often feel like narratives, both internally to ourselves but also in the ways that we express ourselves to others. In many ways we are all telling, editing and rewriting our own stories - whether or not those stories are shared. The fleeting moment in which I connect with a sitter to create their portrait is intrinsically linked with every moment that has come before it, in both their lives and mine. It came to me, through years of development, that I needed to be able to convey the idea of a sitter's interiority; to make the richness of their interior life visually external.

In order to express these ideas, I work to combine realism with bold, whimsical and decorative visual motifs. These often border on the mystical, mythical and magical and are often in the form of flowers, which I feel are wonderful visual shorthand for signifying the many cycles of change, beauty, death, rebirth and resilience we all go through. Often painted in a visual language which juxtaposes the realism of the portrait, these blooms burst forth from, or surround, my sitters, disrupting the expected flow of a traditional portrait and allows us to connect with the invisible stories which become visible, the internal lives become external.

I am currently entering a new phase of my work, experimenting with the aesthetics of folk art. I have long been fascinated with folklore and mythology and how these stories embed themselves in ourselves, our landscapes and our histories, on both a personal and cultural level. Folk art seems to me to be a shorthand for this shared and passed-down storytelling, and so I have been experimenting with incorporating folk art inspired imagery into my work.

Come along, and join the journey!

You can find original paintings and well as prints of my work for sale in my shop.

If you have any questions for me, or would like to discuss a commission, please do not hesitate to get in contact with me using the contact form