Category: Art

Art has always been my stopping place whenever I feel I have something I desperately need to say. Recently, a lot of my work has been studies of faces (although a lot of my pre-university work explored literary texts and book covers too…) but I am moving into thinking more about childhood, loss, and memory, which is what the painting of me as a child with my father – inspired by the final lines of Hughes’s ‘That Morning’ – represents. I am often most struck by warm, vibrant palettes, and usually work with coloured pencils or Procreate. My favourite painter is Shannon Cartier Lucy, whose works – charged with a sense of impending disaster – inspired a lot of my early painting process. 

I am a first year history student at Durham. From a young age I have loved to draw and paint; capturing the human form, particularly in portraiture, has been my main interest. 

My work is mainly inspired by 19th and 20th century realists like Sargent, Zorn and Freud. I am in awe of their ability to capture the sitter with what appears to be such effortless (but in reality, painstaking) brushwork. By attempting to replicate their respective approaches I am able to learn and improve enormously. I am fascinated by the deeply personal aspect of portraiture which allows one to capture an individual in a way that no photograph can; the hope of achieving this makes me want to keep improving.

After leaving school, I wanted to focus on more classical methods like drawing from life and using limited colour pallets for my paintings. During my gap year, I studied on a short course with the Edinburgh Atelier of Fine Art which helped to formally become familiar some of these techniques.