“My childhood home was situated on a gravel road and I spent a lot of time playing on it.
These paintings began with an interest in the bits of rubbish which the traffic squashes into the leathery clay surface of the dirt road which runs past my studio on the outskirts of a farming village. Painting these found objects is a way of exploring where one substance ends and another begins, how we choose to categorize or group things using hierarchies and patterns and in doing so, how we attempt to create order and perhaps, even (non)sense.”

Biography

With zero Spanish or Portuguese, but armed with a copy of Robert Hughes’s book on Frank Auerbach, I spent a gap year as an exchange student to South America. In Argentina, I informally attended an art school for six months and in Brazil, seeing the work by old and modern masters in the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, I was inspired to study art seriously.
On returning to South Africa , I completed the first year of a diploma in Fine Art at the Durban Institute of Technology but based on my interest in drawing I was encouraged to attend Rhodes University. Here, while studying towards a Bachelor in Fine Art, I was taught by the hugely inspiring artist and drawing lecturer George Coutouvidis.
Having worked independently for some years I married the artist Helen Doherty and relocated to Ireland. I furthered my studies at the Crawford College of Art and Design where I graduated with a BFA Honours (with distinction and the thesis prize). If my experience at Rhodes University could be described as skills focussed, then the Crawford College in Ireland by comparison was more concept driven. Having lived in Ireland for fourteen years, I returned to South Africa in 2016 to settle in Calitzdorp and focus on painting; specifically to try to find some middle ground between concepts and skills.

“My childhood home was situated on a gravel road and I spent a lot of time playing on it.
These paintings began with an interest in the bits of rubbish which the traffic squashes into the leathery clay surface of the dirt road which runs past my studio on the outskirts of a farming village. Painting these found objects is a way of exploring where one substance ends and another begins, how we choose to categorize or group things using hierarchies and patterns and in doing so, how we attempt to create order and perhaps, even (non)sense.”