I returned to painting full-time in 2022 after a career in the visual arts in Edinburgh. I studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, graduating in 1982, and my early practice was grounded in representational painting. In recent years, I have consciously re-examined and dismantled those earlier approaches, allowing the work to move towards a less literal and more exploratory visual language.

My practice now occupies a space between representation and abstraction. I am interested in the dialogue between mark-making and passages of paint, and in the tension between the observed image and the traces that bring it into being. Familiar motifs are taken through a transitional process in which memory, perception, and material interaction play an active role.

Living and working in Queensferry, beneath the iconic Forth Bridges and close to my native Fife, the River Forth and its shoreline provide a sustained framework for my work. Daily walks along the coast — beachcombing, observing tidal rhythms, weather systems, and geological formations — inform an evolving body of imagery rooted in long-term engagement with place and environment.

Although painting remains central to my thinking, I work primarily with collage, combining Indian and Japanese handmade papers with monotype elements and layered acrylic washes on paper. This process allows surface, texture, and material structure to actively shape the image, rather than simply support it.

My work is informed by the strong Scottish tradition in which the painted surface serves as a visible record of process and intention, where the mark itself carries meaning. I also feel a strong affinity with painters of the Cornish landscape, whose work established a distinctive modern visual language of the sea within British painting.