The premise—that visual representation might capture something essential about perception or the world—has become increasingly difficult to maintain. This difficulty isn't incidental to my work; it's foundational. After years spent studying how humans actually see, how perception constructs rather than receives reality, how attention shapes what becomes visible, I find myself sceptical of any painting that claims to depict. The empirical reality is bleaker and more interesting: we do not see the world. We see a construction, moment by moment, shaped by memory, expectation, the narrow window of focus, the vast periphery we don't attend to. Merleau-Ponty was right that perception is not a matter of the mind receiving impressions but an embodied engagement with the world—and yet even that formulation can flatten what's actually happening in the gap between eye and scene.

This is not a new problem for painting, but it feels more acute now. We live in an era that has flattened representation itself. Photographs are ubiquitous, digital tools make any image malleable. The cultural conversation has largely moved past asking whether painting can represent and toward asking what else it might do. What painting might do, I've come to think, is offer a record of failure—or more precisely, a record of the attempt to perceive, with all its errors and revisions and moments of reaching toward something just outside the frame of attention.

My background makes this both clearer and more complicated. I spent years building a behavioural research company studying visual attention, eye tracking, the neuroscience of how looking structures what we see. That research was about prediction and control—understanding how perception works so that environments and images could be designed to guide it. But the more I understood the mechanics, the less plausible painting-as-representation became. And the more I painted, the less I cared about representation itself.

The landscapes I paint—most often non-figurative, drawing from memories, sketches and photographs of landscapes under ecological duress—are not attempts to show you what a place looks like. They're attempts to show what it feels like to try to hold attention on something that's being lost or eroded or transformed. The oil glazes on aluminium panels create surfaces that shift with light and angle; you can't pin them down to a single view. The glaze layers work against the glossy substrate, creating depth that contradicts flatness, a materiality that resists the image. This is intentional. It's a way of refusing the illusion of transparent representation.

Turner, Rothko, Diebenkorn, Bacon, Auerbach, Doig—these artists seem to me to have worked from a similar scepticism. They didn't ignore representation; they lived inside its impossibility. Their paintings feel like they're working against themselves, resisting their own image-making. What they offer isn't a view but a way of looking that acknowledges what gets lost in any act of looking.

The ecological dimension matters here, though perhaps not in the way that term is usually deployed in art discourse. I'm only partly interested in making representations of environmental collapse or using landscape as a vehicle for environmental commentary. Rather: the landscapes I paint often are under threat thus the painting becomes a way of attending to something that's actively disappearing, of slowing down the process of loss by working slowly through paint. It's not documentary. It's more like grief, or like the paradoxical act of trying to hold something by letting it dissolve.

This all emerges from a position that's probably unfashionable now. I'm not sure that art should clarify, resolve, or offer affirmation. I'm suspicious of vision-based language in art criticism—"vision," "seeing," as though the artwork grants access or revelation. I resist the vocabulary of exploration and interrogation, those words have hardened into cliché. What interests me instead is what remains unresolved, what the painting fails to accomplish, what gets excluded by any act of attention. The work sits in that exclusion.

What I would like collectors and gallerists to consider is that these works are not decorative, and they're not meant to resolve anything. They're meant to sit with you in productive discomfort, the way a difficult text does. They're the product of thinking, of research into perception, of years spent doubting whether painting was worth doing at all. They tumble through doubt, confusion, beauty, affirmation, resisting visual clarity—these paintings will probably disappoint you, and that's okay.

Born LONDON 1965

Works in France

Residency

2018 Santa Barbara Museum of Art

2025 Onassis Air Athens

Solo Exhibitions

2015 “A mile in their shoes” Edinburgh Fringe/Summerhall

2021 “vanishing sublime” Black Barn Contemporary UK

2022 “la fin d’altérité” Marais, Paris

2023 « Light Itself » Floréal, Paris

2023 Galerie Mercier, Paris

Group Exhibitions

2021 “somewhere unexpected” Norwich Castle (East Anglia Art Fund) UK

2021 “no-where” Cley Contemporary UK