ABOUT ME
I love to paint and draw the things I see: what nature sets before me, the things fashioned by the hands of people, and how those two merge together in harmonious or unexpected ways. I adore drawing and painting animals, pumpkins, statues, old architecture, musical instruments, and, most of all, people. I am currently enjoying sculpting them, too, in a series of clay portrait relief sculptures I call my Mascarons.
My artistic education was varied and began with my parents who had both been artists, and who instructed me and encouraged me in my artistic pursuits, my mother relocating the entire family so that I could study at the famous Baltimore School for the Arts. Studying there concurrently in the Drama Dept were the soon-to-become-legends Tupac Shakur and Jada Pinkett. Whilst there, I also had the opportunity of meeting famed Russian ballet icon Rudolf Nureyev to whom the school gave one of my figure drawings. The teachers, all practising professional artists, planted in me the seeds of my enduring love for the human form, in art history lessons, and classes in painting, sculpting, and regular sustained life drawing seminars.
I was awarded my BFA in Illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art, where I took inspiration from 19th Century master artists like Mucha and Sargent, and later studied in the classical atelier tradition in the studio of Boston School painter Paul Ingbretson for four years. I returned to academia not long after, and received my MFA in Painting from Lesley University.
My fascination with making people the main subject of my art-making led me into the fields of portraiture, illustration, and mural painting. In America I painted lawyers, tango dancers, teachers, accountants, other artists, their families and their pets, my family, and taught lots of people how to do this, too, at university, in adult education classes, and privately from my studio. I made illustrations for magazines and newspapers, for children's books, and painted large murals in schools, full of depictions of the children who studied there.
I relocated to England in 2012, set up in Cornwall, where I met lots of fascinating people, wrote and illustrated my own column for the newspaper there, exhibited my work, briefly appeared on tv, and sold lots of portraits. I now live and work in West Sussex, and still do murals, children's books, and have recently appeared on tv again for Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, where I painted Radio 4's Mishal Husain.
