Escape Into Life, online arts journal, pushes the boundaries of visual art and
literature, blending the two together until they become one poem – a work of Visual Poetry.
Biography Born and educated in Yorkshire and London, England, I arrived in Texas in 2003 where I established myself as a professional artist. Since winning free studio space in Dallas through an art competition in 2009, I have exhibited locally and nationally, am represented by galleries, art dealers and designers, and I recently completed my first public art piece, which is situated on Henderson Avenue in Dallas (2011-2013). I have authored articles in art magazines, taught art in public schools, and I am the VP of a local non-profit art organization.
Statement A core part of my artistic process is my own ongoing experience of and relationship with nature, and the narrative and emotional connotations it has held for me during my own life. I take photographs and create sketches from which I create “digitally” distorted and filtered images, which I then translate into the medium of oil paint. Through the paint I feel a visceral connection to artists throughout the ages, back to the earliest cave paintings and earth pigments smeared on skin. 2011 has seen my interest in the pixel as a core fragment of new culture meld traditional oil painting with digital painting. My commitment to creating a daily drawing on my iPad for 365 days has, perhaps inevitably, influenced my oil paintings, with the two approaches mixing into new ideas, forms and presentations. Concerned with color, light and line, I view my works as visually poetic and symbolic distillations of energy, and in them I layer many ideas of the human experience of life and death, and consciousness, through the framework of my own passionate response to the beauty of the natural world. I want to offer the viewer not only a journey into our inner, psychological wilderness, but a connection to the wider beauty and mysteries of our world.
