I’m a painter based in Clapton, East London, where I’ve lived for nearly 15 years.
I originally studied Fine Art at Leeds University and Interdisciplinary Art and Design at Leeds College of Art and Design, but I came to painting seriously in 2020. Since then, I’ve developed a practice that blends realism with more expressive, intuitive mark making. I have recently started to work primarily in oil paint, but enjoy the vibrancy of acrylics, often from photographs taken on my walks through local green spaces. Colour plays a big part in my work. I’m interested in how it can be used to capture mood and memory, especially when working from photographic images that tend to dull the feeling of the original moment.
In 2023–2024, I spent a year documenting the shifting seasons and landscapes of the Walthamstow Wetlands, which culminated in a solo exhibition at the site’s Engine House. I was also part of Super Nature at the Garden Museum in Lambeth.
For me, painting is a way of exploring complexity, visually, emotionally, and in terms of the world around us. I’m especially drawn to messy, complicated subjects like undergrowth, bushes, and thickets where there’s no obvious focal point. The challenge lies in deciding what to leave out, what to emphasise, and how to translate the chaos of the natural world into a compelling image. At its heart, my work is about paying attention, both to the world, and to the painting process itself.
Statement
My work is a celebration of the wild, tangled, and often overlooked pockets of nature scattered across Hackney and its surrounding marshlands. I invite viewers to pause and look more closely at the ordinary shrubs, hedges, and roadside greenery that quietly shape the landscape of East London. I also draw attention to paint, its richness, its colour and the way it feels on canvas.
Painted from photographs taken on local walks, my works act like a visual diary, capturing fleeting encounters with the natural world in urban settings. My work sits somewhere between realism and abstraction. While the forms of leaves, branches and tangled stems are recognisable, the expressive brushwork and heightened colour palettes pull the viewer into something more intuitive and emotional. Large canvases like Fuchsia Cluster and Fuchsia Cluster II use scale to open up a freer, more gestural language, allowing brushstrokes to echo the chaotic energy of growth. In contrast, smaller works such as Rainbow Thicket or Flash of Burgundy distill scenes into tightly observed fragments, inviting close inspection and rewarding attention to detail.
Though rooted in close observation, these paintings are not straightforward imitations of the natural world. I use colour to heighten the sense of presence and vitality in each image, often exaggerating tones to restore what the camera flattens. In this way, the paintings attempt not only to represent what is seen, but to translate what is felt, light shimmering on frost-tipped brambles, the warmth of pink-tinged leaves in late autumn, the tangle of colour in a roadside thicket.
Throughout my work, there’s attentiveness and care, not only for the subject matter, but for the act of painting itself. My practice is led by intuition and grounded in a simple desire: to look at things that are often passed by, and to hold them up as worthy of our attention.