Recent Acrylic Paintings (2024 onwards)
This was my return to acrylic painting after some time away from it working in digital. It was liberating to work on a large scale for "Sutro Heights" and was in fact the biggest painting I had done to date.
It is a POV painting, partially inspired by David Hockney's POV photo collages.
I enjoyed exploring the ideas of jeopardy, sketch and completion in these paintings. Many of the prominent marks on the painting are the initial brushstrokes or chalk impressions put down first on to the canvas. I was also experimenting with the idea of textile or tattoo textures as details.
Sutro Heights (2024)
The following were pregnancy & birth paintings, influenced by classical nativity & religious art, created around the time of having my first child.
They still echoed the themes of lost bay area animals, I also play with the idea of art history and personal history, remixing elements of classical compositions with pieces and places of my own life.
I added a gold layer of paint as the undercoat for these and allowed it to shine through where possible. It reminded me of the majesty & mystery of early Christian art, which I really love.
Again, I attempted to create a tension of completion, allowing initial marks on a canvas to remain prominent. Leaving different layers of detail and completion to play off one another. Deciding what to leave undone (I want there to be pauses in the painting like pauses in music or speech or writing).
I like the idea of the experience of viewing a painting to be more akin to archaeology, where you are able to observe the whole history of the creation of the painting through the marks visible, where the decisions are laid out in full view, which I believe is the most honest (and vulnerable) way of working.
The Adoration of the Magi (2024)
The Ascension (2025)
The Resurrection (2025)
The following two paintings were created as a pair. In real life these two buildings face each other, share a common history, and are rumoured to be connected by secret tunnels.
It was interesting to approach the two interrelated paintings with different styles, I wanted there to be a fluidity to the condors in the Palace Hotel painting while the buildings remained rigid, as if I was playing with aperture and shutter speed.
I then reversed this with the House of Shields paintings where the birds became more rigid and the building itself was less real, less formed.
I enjoyed the interplay of chalk and levels of detail in the House of Shields painting, I wanted the effect of also peering inside of the painting, inside its layers, as you looked inside the building.
The subject is the California Condor, which once filled the skies of the Bay Area, part of the peninsula's extinct megafauna, of which now only the itinerant whales remain.
The initial composition of the Palace painting was inspired by work from Henry Darger.
For the detail of the condors in the House of Shields painting I had in mind textiles, or tattoos, which I enjoy the obvious artifice, and is something I have used in previous works.
I believe, a painting should be a painting and only a painting, it should be more than just a representation of a photograph or a scene or image, it has to be something in itself through its texture and its process.
And I think that if a painting must be seen as a representation, then it has to be more than just a representation of an image, it must also represent the manner of its own creation.
Condors at the House of Shields (2025)
Condors at the Palace Hotel (2025)