EARLY WORK [PRE-2009]

A sample of my earlier work. This was a time post university when my design career was beginning. When my painting practice took place in the dead of night. I don’t know what it is about being in your twenties, and sleep being out of reach. Some people went out, others read books, I worked with paint. Predominantly acrylic paint, often with a mixed media ground. Masking tape, textured coloured paper, card, charcoal, Letraset, nothing was off the table. At this time in my life, if it was 3am and I had some black paint to hand, I was happy. This was perhaps the beginning of my figurative explorations.

In 2009, I took a course at LARA (London Atelier for Representational Art), studying the art of oil painting under Anastasia Pollard, alongside a group of like-minded emerging artists. This really sparked my desire to paint figures, but heavily anchored in narrative and emotion. Not because that is what I was taught to do, but because I was given a new language, and that is what my practice wanted to do with it. Everything I have made since, has been guided by the principles I learned on those sunny weeks in Clapham, London.

Seated Figure [unfinished]. Oil on canvas, 50×60cm. Painted during my weeks spent at LARA, 2009.