About

Classically trained artist working in the media of oil painting and print-making in the New Forest, England.

I received my artistic training in Florence, Italy, where I learned figurative drawing and painting at the atelier of the American artist Charles H. Cecil. Following my first year of study I was invited to teach, alongside my own studies, which I continued for a further four years.

In Florence we were taught to work exclusively from life using the historic sight-size technique, and were encouraged to study and appreciate the effects of natural light upon the model. Painting directly from nature enables the artist to make a living connection to the scene they are viewing: the final painting being the result of the interchange between the painter, the sitter, and their surroundings; while under the intense, usually single light source, colour becomes secondary to atmospheric light and shade in the construction of form. The principles and techniques I learned during these formative years remain the foundation on which my work still evolves.

On returning to the UK, I studied for an undergraduate degree in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen, graduating in the summer of 2012 with First Class Honours. In 2014 I resumed my academic studies to read for an MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford, graduating the following year with a Distinction. For both my degrees, my dissertation topic centred on the critical output of the Scottish nineteenth-century artist and art critic Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, whose aesthetic philosophies - most notably his belief in the primacy of the ‘impressionistic vision’ in painting - have had a profound influence on my own artistic approach. See here for more on my continuing research on this exceptional art theorist.