Extended Biographical Statement

My work begins with a simple fascination for the overlooked and apparent ordinariness of everyday natural objects. I’m interested in the apparent banality of the overly familiar, to which we often seem to have become de-sensitized to. I look to explore and expose the concealed beauty within nature, so that we marvel at it once more.

The polar extreme to this exploration of beauty is an acknowledgement of the destruction embedded within my personal history. Therefore, a powerful motivation in my work is to offset the destructive events of my early childhood.

The idyllic times of my childhood were spent foraging the overgrown lands of abandoned railways which ran at the back of our family house. There was always a fascination at the sight of the colossal dragonflies which hovered overhead; a fascination for the glistening skins of frogs and toads darting beneath the wild undergrowth, and an excitement at discovering those hibernating newts buried beneath mounds of earth, magically reanimating from stasis.

At the same time I grew up with a deeply tormented elder brother. Six years older than me, he gradually began fracturing under the pressure of an unrelenting mental illness which made him deeply delusional and psychotic. Slowly I watched an illness ravage my brother’s beauty, and the beauty of our family. The ‘voices’ he heard demanded destructive actions against us. He destroyed all things related to glass: windows, mirrors, light-bulbs, television sets, front door panes, milk bottles, and even the large family aquarium which held such tremendous beauty for me. There was also one other thing of great beauty he came close to destroying, something which has come to seem glasslike to me now: This was our ‘family’ and all that it implied.

As an eight-year-old, and in the following seven years, I never thought of my brother as a brother as such, but more as a crazed individual determined to destroy us no matter what – and one who just happened to live with us. Of course he was as much a victim of his illness as we were!

So how difficult was it living with a violent brother? The answer ultimately lies with the eight-year-old boy buried under his bed as the house he lives in is being obliterated, as the glass shatters about him, as his family is tormented to the brink of insanity. Only the child knows how truly horrifying it was, and in many ways this horror stays with him. So I paint a world of beauty for him. And in some strange way I paint a vision of beauty for my brother too, for clearly he has known little beauty in his life.

When I visit James in his care home now, I do so with the love and compassion for a brother who has suffered deeply. This is a period in my life which I will always struggle to fully make sense of. For years it felt as though I too had somehow adopted his madness, spending much of my early adulthood living a self-destructive lifestyle, desperately seeking to numb my own pain through various kinds of recreational drugs. And then finally I returned to my art, grounding myself at last. As an artist I am fortunate to have the opportunity to bring some kind of understanding to those traumatic years. What better motivation can there be for an artist than to translate childhood demons into visions of personal beauty?

So how does the destruction of a childhood translate into beautiful images of fruit and natural objects within glass? Shouldn’t I be creating violent and tormented images like the expressionists? There are of course no laws to the mechanisms involved when translating one’s personal demons. One can never underestimate the power of art to heal and stimulate in a myriad of unexpected ways; to generate artistic worlds peculiar and specific to an individual.

The peacefulness of the objects in my paintings is in many ways an ideal subject for transcending the trauma of those events, for reclaiming my own light and creating my own peace. They ask nothing, and offer only tranquility and beauty in return. The redeeming power of nature, be it through portrayals of sea or landscape, or images of fruit, leaves, shells, birds and butterflies, has no end. ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower’, as the poet Blake astutely remarked, is a wonderful summation of an important motivational aspect of my work.

Regardless of subject matter, I create a sanctuary; a controlled place within my paintings, a place where I now bring order and peace, where once there was none. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I like to think of my paintings as doing the former. The mind naturally tries to seek out happiness and bliss, like water seeking its lowest point. To paint the destructive nature of my childhood, for me at least, would mean having to relive it constantly: to never find release; to never move forward. So I move forward, unashamedly drawn to the representation of the simple but beautiful objects within nature.

So my brother was constantly exploding glass. This is essential to my work. The family glass aquarium was an ideal, something peaceful and beautiful. When he exploded its glass façade with a brick, I learnt in an instant how ephemeral beauty could be. Within the gushing waters I saw an array of fish and shattered glass come crashing to the floor; fish gasping and flailing in a fused image of beauty and destruction. This image of beauty beside destruction has fascinated me ever since, in particular that of glass and its metaphorical relationship to beauty and destruction.

While such incidents are a thing of the past, glass appears in all my paintings. Now glass has been reconstructed into an ideal state, as something whole and beautiful. It is also a metaphorical means of capturing and preserving natural beauty; of depriving nature of its unstoppable drive to tear down beauty and return it to matter.