Artist Statement

Home
Whatever Happened to Paint by Numbers?
PBN Work
Artist Statement
Landscapes
Prints
Portraits
Fruit
Bio
Press Gallery
Studio cats
Contact

As a painter, I am interested in people, who they are, how they express their personalities, how they fit into society or don’t, their stories. I am concerned with issues of gender, race, nationality, class, religion & sexual identity & how these concepts are used to define people and cultures. I am drawn to narrative as a result and portraiture in particular.

My fine art training was at NSCAD University, a school known for conceptualism and minimalism. While I think out and plan my paintings, I am nonetheless an intuitive, expressive painter with an emotional use of colour. 

My influences as a painter are varied: Tom Thomson, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, Wayne Thiebaud, David Hockney, Mary Pratt, Matisse, Francis Bacon, Manet and John Singer Sargent.

It has always been important to me to communicate with my work. I am interested in class, thus the hierarchy between high and low culture, elite and popular culture, art versus craft, professional versus amateur. The whole phenomenon of the wildly successful paint by numbers craze that was vehemently denigrated by art critics has held my fascination since 2000.

Since that time I have challenged myself to deal with this imagery. I have tried different schemata; enlarging details out of context and comprehension to make abstract images, deliberately painting in heavy impasto as opposed to the uniformly flat surfaces of the source material, using the line drawings alone and now deconstructing and reconstructing the images into a new and more complex aesthetic.

It is art about Art, or art about a hobbyist fad that threatened Art.