In recent months I’ve been working on a series of intimate, small-scale abstract paintings. Quite often, they come in pairs, as diptychs. As you can see from their titles, they usually begin with a highly specific referent, and for the most part, I see these paintings as rooted in the landscape tradition.

I take my cues from the geometry of the South London suburbs, the bounded spaces of the English countryside, the stacked layers of the Amalfi coastline and the chaotic streets of Naples. If I visit a place, chances are I’m interested.

For me, painting is always a trade-off between planning and improvisation. I constantly sketch, and I make preparatory drawings. After that, all bets are off. Very quickly, the painting takes over: it tells me what is required next.

I’ve been developing a kind of makeshift tempera, mixing egg yolk into tubed watercolour and gouache. It’s a strange medium, with its links to Christian icon and Roman Egyptian funerary painting. Mostly, though, I like what it does to the paint: the tempera binder ruggedises it, allowing me to scratch back, overlay, correct and adjust without (in most cases) destroying what I’m working on.

For me, painting in the twenty-first century has a responsibility to be a profoundly fallible form of communication, made in a world saturated with instantaneous, stimulatory, digitised images. Painting carries about 60,000 years of baggage. In each age, something new seems to be asked of it.

You can see more of my work on Instagram.

Selected works

Selected Exhibitions

Southwark Park Galleries Annual Open, London — 2024
Southwark Park Galleries Annual Open, London — 2023