“I like to paint. I like colour. I like to juxtapose colours to both enhance and remind me of the value of each colour. I like big and bold. I paint in the quiet of my studio where I mess around with paint on a canvas until it starts to make me hear or see what the person is thinking or if a landscape until I can hear the scene.

The references for my paintings are pictures that I have of people I know, as well as random scenes of people and places -most capture a conversation, a thought, a moment in a day when no one is watching, a fold in a shirt or a shadow in a scarf.

I sketch with paint. For me the pencil gets in the way of the design. I paint both landscapes and people, more recently people – people turned away from the viewer, people who have no heads, just a body that keeps me wondering who it is, or just people caught in a moment.

I use big canvases-small is just too constricting. Bigger gives me lots of room to bring something to life. I use mostly acrylic and for me the medium is most forgiving —I am a messy painter. I paint loosely and let the paint drip and run where it wants- and then I try to bring it back to a recognizable form.

My influences are many- but mostly my family who are/were painters when they weren’t/aren’t involved in other life projects—my father who painted and always said paint what you hear, my mother who always painted with an abstract boldness, my nephew who paints what he is thinking and my son who sketches very deliberately.”