See No Evil?
He looks happy. That is the first thing you notice. Mouth open, hands raised and hand sets in hand, face tilted toward whatever world the headset has built for him. The water holds him. He is, by any measure, at peace.
But his sight distracted.
Not closed. Not averted. Gone - replaced entirely by something engineered to be more compelling than what was already there. And the question this painting refuses to let go of is not whether what he sees is beautiful. It is whether he still has any idea what he is no longer looking at.
We have not been forced to look away. We have been given something better to look at. That distinction matters. The original gesture was an act of will - a choice to refuse. This is something quieter and harder to name. A choice that stopped feeling like a choice a long time ago.
When did you last look at something that wasn't a screen and feel like it was enough?
Oil on canvas - 30 × 30 cm
Part of Are these Tools or Temples? triptych
Hear No Evil?
The red headphones sit on him like a crown. Bold, deliberate, chosen. His expression is settled - not absent, not glazed, but genuinely at ease. He has found his frequency and closed the door on everything outside it.
The silence has always asked things of us that noise never does. Questions surface. Doubts find their voice. The things we have been avoiding locate us eventually, in the spaces between sounds.
And the question is not whether what he hears is harmful. It may be beautiful. It may be meaningful. It may be exactly what he needs. But a curated world is still a constructed one - and what is constructed can be constructed by someone else, for reasons that have nothing to do with your wellbeing, dressed so carefully in your own preferences that you mistake the whole arrangement for freedom.
Is he hearing what he chooses - or hearing what he has been given and calling it a choice?
Oil on canvas - 30 × 30 cm
Part of Are these Tools or Temples? triptych
Speak No Evil?
He holds the phone the way you hold something you have decided to trust completely, and his gaze carries the particular quality of someone who has made their peace with a complicated arrangement.
Something is already transmitting.
The original gesture understood something about the relationship between speech and consequence - that a voice carries weight, that words do damage that cannot always be undone, that the gap between thinking something and saying it is not dead space but necessary ground.
Everything travels at a speed that outruns reflection entirely - and lands somewhere before you have finished deciding whether it should have left at all. Something that began as an expression became something else.
Are we speaking - or are we being spoken through?
He may genuinely believe every word. And the mountain, which has held its silence for ten thousand years, does not know the difference between a truth and a very confident lie.
Oil on canvas - 30 × 30 cm
Part of Are these Tools or Temples? triptych
Is the straight jacket mine or yours?
The straight jacket in this painting does not belong to the cat. It was never the cat's idea.
This piece asks two questions that are harder to separate than they appear: how many of the limits placed on others exist only in our perception of them, and how many of the limits we carry ourselves were put there by someone else's hand, so long ago that we have forgotten they were never ours to begin with.
The cat, for its part, seems unbothered.
Is the straight jacket mine or yours?
Oil on canvas board 20.3cm x 25.4cm
Trevor's Cunning Charisma
This is a commissioned portrait of a cat who was, by any conventional measure, completely unhinged. And yet there was something almost admirable in it, the total absence of self-doubt. The commitment to his own nature, regardless of the inconvenience it caused.
Trevor went missing eventually. Somehow that feels exactly right. He was never going to stay.
Oil on canvas. 20cm × 20cm.
The Curious Case of the Sphynx
I did not want to paint this cat.
The Sphynx unsettled me in the way that things you do not understand often do. But discomfort, I have learned, is usually pointing at something worth looking at. The more I looked, the more I saw a creature entirely comfortable in its own strange skin.
That felt worth painting.
Oil Painting canvas 40cmx30cm
Flores Mila
was not immediately easy to love. Fierce in her first impression, guarded in her instincts, she kept you at a distance until she decided, on her own terms, that you had earned something closer.
I had met her. I knew that distance. I also knew what was behind it.
The flowers in this painting carry two things at once: her name and her owner's quiet devotion to the natural world. Together, they frame a dog who was more complex than she first appeared. More gentle than she let on.
This is what a commission can do that a photograph cannot: hold not just the likeness, but the full character of the subject. The parts that only reveal themselves over time.
Oil on round canvas. 50cm × 50cm.
Under the Veil of Tradition
Every Easter, the shops fill with chocolate eggs. Creme eggs appear, are consumed, and disappear again until next year, a ritual so embedded in the calendar that almost no one stops to ask where it came from. Or what it once meant. Or how far the thing we now celebrate has travelled from the thing it was.
The lizard hatching from a creme egg is not a joke. It is a question.
What happens to a tradition when it is adapted, repackaged and sold back to us at a seasonal markup? At what point does the root reason, the original meaning, get quietly swapped out for something more commercially convenient? And why, year after year, do we go along with it?
Under the Veil of Tradition does not answer those questions. It just makes them harder to ignore.
Oil on canvas. 30cm × 30cm
Cluck & Curl
The Polish Chicken has a crest that is Extraordinary, layered, and entirely its own. A plumage that needed nothing added to it.
And yet here are the rollers.
This is a quiet question about the things we absorb from the world around us the outside influences that settle so easily into how we see ourselves, until we forget what was already there. What was already enough. What was, from the beginning, made well.
The chicken is unbothered. Perhaps that is the lesson.
Oil on round canvas. 40cm × 40cm.
Entitled & Bold
A small dog, carried in a designer bag, wearing an expression that suggested the bag was the least it deserved.
It made me think about comfort. Not as a blessing acknowledged, What happens to us when ease becomes expectation? When we have been given so much that we lose the ability to receive it with any grace, and begin, almost without noticing, to pass that restlessness on. To the next generation. To the animals we keep. To anyone within reach of our quiet dissatisfaction.
The Brabancon is not a villain. It is a mirror.
A reminder that the most grounded thing any of us can do is return to gratitude for what we have already been given.
Oil on canvas. 30cm x 40cm
Samson's Golden Legacy
Some personalities are too large for the space they occupied.
Samson, a Pomeranian-Pekingese with the loyalty of a guardian and the personality of someone who had never once doubted his own importance, is gone now.
This painting was not made for a collector. It was made for me. A way of keeping him close. Of holding, in paint, what a photograph could only record.
There are animals that leave a mark disproportionate to their size. Samson was one of those.
This one is personal.
Oil on canvas. 30cm × 40cm.
Words of Consequence
Two opposing views. A concern raised honestly. And then in an instant, something shifted. The exchange stopped being about what was true and became about who was winning. Words sharpened. Defences rose. The ego, ancient and territorial, took the wheel.
The parakeet holds the pin loosely. It may not even understand what it is holding. It only knows it has a voice, and that using it felt justified.
Words of Consequence asks how far we are willing to go in defence of a position. How much of what we call conviction is actually ego in disguise. And at what point does the implementation of our ideologies, however passionately held, begin to work against the very nature we share?
The pin is already out. The rest is up to us.
Oil on canvas. 30cm × 40cm.
Tranquil Respite
A Japanese macaque, eyes closed, submerged to the shoulders in warm water.
There is something almost unbearably familiar about this image the deliberate withdrawal, the search for stillness in the middle of everything. The monkey does not perform peace. It simply inhabits it.
An invitation to consider what your own hot spring looks like
Oil on Canvas 30cm x 30cm
There is always one who will not follow.
A sheep concealed in foliage — present but apart, watching but not joining. This piece was made during a period of social turbulence, when the instinct to question felt both necessary and quietly dangerous.
The rebel is hidden, not out of fear. They are choosing their moment.
An acrylic on canvas paper (18cm x 24cm).
A cat in a box. A simple image until it isn't.
This was the first painting made after a long absence from the canvas. The return was not planned. It was necessary. The box is both confinement and threshold, the moment just before something shifts, when the weight of a situation finally becomes visible.
Oil on canvas. 18cm × 24cm.