I’m a self-taught painter based in Melbourne, Australia, working mostly in oils on canvas and board. I only came to painting seriously in recent years, and I still paint part-time, around other work — but it’s become the part of the week I look forward to most. I work from life in the studio as much as from photographs.

Whatever the subject, what I’m really after is character: the particular tilt of a dog’s head, the weight of a single pear in low light, the eye of a bird of prey. Commissioned portraits are where much of that began, but still life is what I keep coming back to, and I’m steadily working my way toward landscape and new ground.