I came to painting through a life spent in creative work. Years in the design and visual industries taught me to look carefully, at composition, at light, at the way a single image can hold an idea that words struggle to contain. When I eventually picked up a brush, it felt less like a new beginning than a natural deepening of a conversation I had always been having.

My paintings are figurative and realistic, but their subject is rarely just what is shown. I am drawn to figures in space, people on pathways, at thresholds, facing open skies or distant horizons. These are paintings about perspective, in both senses of the word, the literal geometry of where a person stands, and the inner one, how we see the world we are given, and what we do with that view.

At the heart of much of my work is a question I find myself returning to again and again: how are we shaped, and how do we shape others? Particularly our children. I am interested in the quiet, often invisible ways that society, family, and circumstance hand us a version of the world, a path already worn into the ground before we have chosen to walk it. I want my paintings to sit with that tension, not to answer it, but to make it visible and worth pondering.

The artists I return to most are those who found the monumental in the ordinary and the personal in the universal. Edward Hopper's solitary figures, caught between interior and exterior, stillness and longing, have long felt like a spiritual home to me. Lucian Freud's unflinching honesty about the human form and its inner life. Norman Rockwell's belief that the everyday deserves to be painted with care and dignity. Stanley Spencer's strange, tender intensity, his sense that the sacred and the domestic are always intertwined. And David Hockney's joyful interrogation of perspective itself, the way he makes us aware that seeing is always a choice.

These are paintings made slowly, and meant to be looked at slowly. I hope they offer something to sit with, a moment of recognition, or a question that stays with you after you have moved on.