What I do

My preferred form of artistic expression is painting but I also enjoy creating the occasional lino-cut print or pastel. My work is mainly abstract and domestic in scale. I distrust images made by computers and mechanical aids, so I prefer the hand drawn line as, after all, there are no straight lines in nature. 

While it is fair to describe my imagery as abstract, I try to make my work reflect something enigmatic in the viewer’s mind. I enjoy creating paintings, drawings or prints which feature repeat pattens, and I try to achieve this by challenging the symmetrical repetition of most pattens. A paired-back colour palette is consistent in my imagery as are short pithy titles. Many artists and styles inspire me, but I largely choose to go my own way.

As the son of two artists, I grew up in the family-run art centre in England. My art training was varied and intermittent and included ceramic tuition at Braintree College in Essex (a fellow student was the Turner Prize winning artist Grayson Perry) and later a Foundation year at the respected Sir John Cass School of Art in London.

After moving to Australia in the 1980s I put my art career on hold to concentrate on making a living as a horticulturist and being a dad. Since 2011 I have returned to art making after discovering the joys of painting and printmaking. I have exhibited my work in a number of solo and group shows in Sydney and regional New South Wales and look forward to new exhibitions, projects and collaborations. I now live 800 meters up on the watershed of the Great Dividing Range 200 km west of Sydney.

I also have a keen interest in the history of art and have written widely on artists both in Australia and Britain. While studying for my Art History degree at the University of Sydney I was appointed Researcher-In-Residence for the Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) academic website. I have also written two well received art monographs: Percy Lindsay: artist and bohemian (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), and a biography of my parents: Under Moonlight: a portrait of Great Bardfield artists Stanley Clifford-Smith and Joan Glass (self-published, 2016).