Turret Love

This is a little housewarming card I put together for my friend Beth, who has just moved in with her boyfriend Phil, in their lovely little house in London, with it's very own turret!

For a while now I have been collecting dried up pieces of paint, peeled from my pallet and I suppose ready for the bin. I however try my best to salvage everything and make something new from it. The colours which accidentally swirl together, make incredible shapes and patterns - particularly on the underside - and I can often make images from them in my head; I suppose it's a bit like looking up at the sky and making pictures from the cloud formations. I initially did not know what to put on the front of a "Happy New Home" card (apart from the obvious picture of a house), but when looking through my scraps of paint, my brain saw a duvet and a little head poking out of the top of it. That was it! With a few additions of paint and illustration over the top, others can now hopefully see what I saw so clearly.

Look harder, and you will always find beauty.

Exterior of Juan Sanchez

A local tapas bar commissioned me to paint the exterior lettering for them, incorporating the name Juan Sanchez and a selection of Spanish words including Vino and Sangria. I have had really good feedback on the work and was personally very pleased with the outcome. A little change from the normal murals and great to be working from such a specific brief. Looking forward to returning to do some interior painting for them on the furniture and along the front of the bar....as well as sampling the cerveza y paella!

Seeing Double

This was a very interesting and accidental angle I found to take photographs...from inside my musical jewellery box...

An unusual view of the city

Manchester, the sky and reflections. Equals a winning combination.

The City Speaks

Graffiti is something that has fascinated me since my GCSEs when I embarked on a project about "Underground Art" on the American subway...much to the dismay of my tutor, who considered it to be nothing but defasive criminal activity. She didn't deter me though and since living in an urban environment, my interest has widened to general words, symbols and images which silently appear on walls and pavements - in fact any flat surface, which was not intended to be a canvas, but none the less becomes one.

Up close and personnal

Natural textures are always appealing to me. Anything we would normally just walk past....a brick in the wall, a crack in the pavement or a piece of fallen plaster. Things which are seen to exist for their practical purposes are often overlooked for their accidental beauty.

Look closer next time.

Doors to the past?

Having been in this wonderful City of Manchester for nearly 6 years now, I have built up quite a collection of photos from round and about my strolls. My phone camera usually proves adequate to capture streets, doors, buildings, textures, views etc and I now have a body of work which documents the many sights which inspire me and feed into my paintings, illustrations and collages. Anything quiet, abandoned, forgotten and ooozing with history gets me going.

Doors are a special fascination for me, because they lead to, or used to lead to, somewhere or something else to what you see on the outside.