It is a strange thing to try and sum yourself up in a personal biography, for you never are just one thing, one paragraph, but a collection of thoughts, viewpoints, experiences and learning.

This becomes ever more difficult when you are an artist trying to describe the work you do, for what you may classify your work as, others may have a very different interpretation. So I guess what I can do, is to tell you what I am motivated by in my work, what inspires me, and then you can apply that to me and my work as you see fit. I am a painter, photographer and writer, who is captivated by the nature of humanity, and the humanity in nature. What do I mean by that? Well, I am interested in human motivations, why we do the things we do, our faults as well as our strengths. How we impact the world we inhabit, both through the environment and the animals that inhabit it. I have a great love of nature, so I am interested in illuminating the beauty I see in it, but also how we project ourselves onto nature. The personification of the animal portraits I have picked is made easier on the viewer due to the expressions portrayed on the faces of the creatures.

When I am painting and in my photography, I often try and elevate that which might not necessarily be considered beautiful. Other times I just try and capture that which is worth seeing in our world, sometimes images that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. In other words, my art just might be an attempt at elevating that which I consider important in this world.

I consider conservation efforts to be one of the key efforts for mankind going into the future, the protection of both habitats and the animals that inhabit them. The creation of animal portraits on scratchboard is a painstaking process where any excess stroke can ruin the work you have done, which in so many ways relates to the conservation process and the careful approach that must be taken.