“I have come to realise I adore painting people, but I love to paint children, there’s an undeniable innocence and unselfconscious energy that they exude which I really enjoy trying to capture.  Children are rarely thinking about how to look when a camera is pointed at them, they are free of that worry or if they are aware they play to it in a way we adults rarely do.  It doesn’t matter if they are playing and being silly, or if you catch them in a contemplative moment, for me, children make amazing subjects.

Occasionally I get to paint whatever catches my interest personally, and my subjects tend to veer towards women and a sense of trying to unpick the emotions which are so often concealed behind the barriers we feel the need to project to society at large.  In this age of social media where we are bombarded with photographs that are manipulated and staged, I try to scratch beneath that surface layer of gloss to reveal a moment of something real, to what they were really feeling in that moment.”