About The Artist

As a professional artist I paint full time and I exhibit and sell my paintings at exhibitions, online and to private and corporate clients. I paint landscapes, urban cityscapes, cats, dogs and other animals, but a love of cats has led me to specialize in feline portraiture. I am a full member of SOFA, the Society Of Feline Artists.

I studied photography at Bournemouth College of Art and then went on to work as a graphic designer. I do a fair amount of digital painting for illustration and this led me back to my first love, painting.

I am owned by five cats at the moment who often appear in my paintings. Charlie, my brown spotted Bengal is a particularly good model but his brother Ming is much more of a four footed hazard. He loves to steal my paint brushes, complete with paint too!

Contemporary Animal Art

I work mainly in oils and acrylics on fine grained canvas and with acrylics on watercolour paper.

I sell original paintings and limited edition prints and I take commissions to paint portraits of animals. People often ask if I can work from photos and the answer is yes I can. I get commissions from many different countries so working from photographs plays quite a large part in the process.

I try to capture the spirit and personality of the sitter so that when you look at the painting you feel that he or she is staring back at you. I’m much less interested in the correct colours in the coat or the correct markings, I prefer to use colours that emphasize the personality and emotional content in the painting.

Painting in a loose style in oils or acrylics allows me to play with colour quite freely and only as the picture nears completion do I turn to the details, which are nearly all in the face, especially the eyes. That’s where the painting either lives or dies. If I succeed, then it feels as if the painting has come alive, as if a part of the sitter has come to live in the painting. If I fail then no matter what I do the picture will never work.

If you'd like a unique painting of a favourite feline or canine please have a look at www.thepaintedcat.co.uk or www.thepainteddog.co.uk where you’ll find galleries of paintings, prints for sale and information about commissions.