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The Artist

A Life in Paint

On listening, on making, and on the long practice of learning to see.

All artists have a muse. This one is Mine.

"I did not choose painting. Painting chose me — insistently, across many years of trying to do other things."

My father was a Scottish paratrooper drill sargeant and my mother a secret agent who worked for MI 5 on the Enigma project during WWII. The British army noticed she was good at spotting patterns in German communications that helped decipher military code.

Growing up was interesting.

I inherited my mother's ability to see patterns in the world around me and started drawing at the age of 13. Later in life, I apprenticed with British Oil Painter Peter Corbet. He was a marvellous, great-hearted man who taught me how to laugh at life as well as how to use oil paints with some great techniques.

Origins

Life & Influences

As a young man in my twenties, I had gone out to western Canada to pay off my student loans and met a wildly beautiful and mysterious native girl who had an enormous affect on me - on what I believed was real. She was quite a magical little creature and exerienced a world vastly different from the western scientific rationalism I had been brought up with.

I learned that there was something out there - something beyond the veil so to speak - something conscious and capable of communication. The medium it used to communicate was coincidence - large impossible coincidences. I won't go into the details of it here but I have written a book about it, the first few chapters of which you can read from the "The Book" link above.

I ran away from the experiences after two and a half years for reasons I won't go into here. To be brief: spirituality turned out to be a much more powerful force than I could deal with, so I buried myself in normalcy - work mostly. I became a carpenter/construction worker and quite happily smashed, hammered and shoveled my way to a very satisfying life. The work grounded me and put about 50 pounds of muscle onto my pitiful 125-pound pencil-pushing student body.

After ten years of this, I turned into a computer nerd - caught the dot boom just as it was happening and turned into a successful front-end developer. After ten years of financial success, I grew tired of the emptiness in my life. I missed the deeply spiritual existence I once experienced oh so long ago.

The view from the studio with The Ascension being created in the background.

As in the movie “Work, Pray, Love”, I had abandoned a 6 figure salary and joined an Ashram to deal with my issues and evolve my spirituality. While there I learned a new way of painting - not to use my mind, not to have the vaguest idea what I was doing and simply paint with emotion and spirit. It turned out to be a way of vibing with the universe and letting it create the art for me.

What was unusual about this was the fact that the phenomenon of spontaneous apparition began to occur in about 90% of my paintings - by coincidence. After an hour of yoga and an hour of meditation, I would create a completely abstract painting using techniques no one has yet discovered to fully randomise the initial stage of a painting's development.

The result was a vibrant flow of colour and energy rich with texture. Meditating on these paintings brought about the realisation that patterns were appearing in the paintings - images created by faint gradations of colour that took very little input from me to bring out. Some of the shapes merged into complete, comprehensive themes.

I soon began to realise that the impossible coincidences that had once filled my life had returned and whatever it was that I communicated with so long ago had returned. I regard my paintings as physical evidence that what I call "the Abyss" is conscious and capable of communication.

The Work

Practice & Process

The studio in spring — light from the north window, the only window that matters.

I work in oils exclusively. I have tried other media seriously but returned finally to oil — for its magical qualities that no other medium quite matches. It's the randomness of the special effects I do that allows all kinds of patterns to spontaneously appear. No other medium has that quality - the richness of the textures.

A painting begins not at the canvas but long before it — in the accumulation of small observations that eventually reach a kind of pressure. The work is effortless. I have fun pretending that I am a Great Artist with an awesome God/Goddess/Abyss thingy flowing through me into this world. That pretending seems to bring out the best in me and is probably responsible for some of the more interesting aspects of my work.

I also get to let out the child in me - the creature that loves colour and doesn't really care what he creates with it. I never judge what I do or feel like an idiot for not knowing what I am doing. It seems to be all a part of the process. I have fun with it and let the Abyss do the heavy lifting.

In the studio I try to work without deciding too much in advance. The first session on any canvas is always exploratory — I am finding out what the painting wants to be, not executing a plan. Later sessions are more deliberate, but even then I try to remain open to what arrives unexpectedly.

Record

Exhibitions & Recognition

2022
Still & Moving Group exhibition— Studio open show, Toulouse, France
2020
The Listening Eye Solo exhibition, Riga, Latvia
2011
Eye of the Beholder Group exhibition (4) — Gallery, Chicago, IL
2010
Passion and Spirit - A Journey into the Light Solo exhibition — The Donnelly Gallery, Toronto, ON
2025
Selected Works in Private Collections Canada, United States, Europe

What's Next

See the Paintings

The biography is the context. The paintings are the thing itself.

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