Graduated from Belfast Art College (UUB) in the 1990's and has since worked in many fields including advertising, design (large scale artworks in Titanic Belfast visitor centre), scenic art, animation, private commissions, etc
Recent work has been mostly in editorial illustration, doing weekly images for the Financial Times Comment pages since 2010 as well as many pieces and cover images for New Statesman magazine among others. I stopped painting when I became a parent 15 years ago and only recently began to feel like it was something I needed to get back to again - as a necessary distraction from an increasingly digital world…
Utilitarian machinery - vehicles designed to do a job rather than to be aesthetically pleasing - seem to embody the very essence of the design principle of 'form follows function' and as such have an honesty and authenticity about them that I find appealing as subjects.
The submitted pieces pick up on this theme - humble, relatively unsophisticated working vehicles that possess a character, a purpose and a presence and are often painted simply in flat primary colours.
My interest is in exploring the relationship between the basic geometric shapes of the subject and how those shapes interact with the rigid constraints presented by the 4 straight edges of the painting surface - the composition becomes 'tethered' to the edges which in turn creates new shapes in areas of negative space in the process.
The particular grey tractor in the painting has a strong association for me as an object - it represents a humble, unassuming presence and a close connection to the soil. The painting is an attempt to capture something of that character & presence but is also somewhat allegorical.
Paint itself can be described as 'vehicle plus pigment' - the 'pigment' being colour and the 'vehicle' being the medium (oil/acrylic/etc) that carries the colour to the painting surface and gives it permanence. That description seemed apt as a blanket title for my paintings on this theme.
Over the years on the FT Comment page and New Statesman I've supplied illustrations for opinion pieces and essays by ex-Prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, ex-Cabinet Ministers like Michael Portillo, Nigel Lawson, and other commentators such as Alastair Campbell, Rowan Williams, Simon Sebag Montefiore and many others.
The main thing with the editorial illustrations is the quick turnaround, sometimes only a matter of hours between reading the text and producing a final artwork that reflects the author's argument. It has required the need to develop a way of working to accommodate this.
One week FTComment messaged me to say they wouldn't need an illustration from me that week because David Hockney was doing the page! Which was fair enough, I thought! I also recently found out that New Statesman was the first publication to print poems by Seamus Heaney back in the 1960's, which is a tenuous link to the great man but something that I was quite proud to hear.
For several years I also did weekly covers for historical publications, which required quite a lot of research into quite varied historical topics. I had to understand the history before I could come up with an image, which was a challenge.
I won a Gold award from the Association of Illustrators in London, and a Gold from the Society of Artists Agents for a London Underground poster design. And also a billboard campaign for Kingsmill bread I worked on for a Belfast design agency won a PANI award.