Having spent 34 years as an illustrator and portrait painter, specializing in figurative watercolors for book covers and magazine stories, I am now able to concentrate on producing work which is more of a direct response to my environment. As I spend a lot of my time in the Balkan mountains, this means many paintings of trees and more recently cows. The local farmer installed some young bullocks in the field next to my studio and I have found these gentle souls to make excellent subject matter for watercolor studies and more recently for larger oil paintings.

It is the colors of autumn which provide the inspiration for the majority of my forestscapes. When the overwhelming green of summer has gone , I am out in the woods soaking it all in. It is that feeling of being amongst the trees that I am trying to get down on the canvas and trying to do justice to their magnificent variety of shape and texture.

A little about the work..

Whilst I am primarily a fairly realistic painter, my style has fluctuated over the years and the approach to each painting does vary. I have a fairly consistent approach to watercolours but the oils can be quite impressionistic, as in the painting above, or if it’s all getting too overwhelming, I might start to leave out a lot of detail and simplify things. It usually falls somewhere between the two.