Studio

Where every canvas starts as a question and ends as a surprise.

Currently Working On · April 2026

Oil, Portrait & the Charcoal Line

April has been about slowing down. Oil painting demands it — you can’t rush the medium, so you stop trying to rush the thinking. This month the studio has been full of portrait studies, gestural abstracts in oil, and a return to charcoal. The line in charcoal is immediate in a way paint never quite is. Honest. Unforgiving. I’ve missed it.

Each of these works started without a destination. That’s the rule now — no plan, no reference pinned to the wall telling me what the finished thing should look like. Just a blank surface, a feeling, and whatever happens when you stop deciding and start listening.

The best thing about a fresh canvas is that it doesn’t know what you usually do.

The portraits are not about likeness. They’re about presence — the particular way light sits on a forehead, the weight of a gaze that isn’t looking at you but somewhere just past you. Getting that right in oil means building up slowly, letting layers dry, coming back the next day with fresh eyes. It teaches patience the way nothing else does.

And then charcoal resets everything. Fast, physical, no undo. One mark and you’re committed. I love the discipline of it.

Out in Nature · 2025

Plein Air: Where the Canvas Meets the Open Sky

There’s a particular kind of attention that only happens outdoors. Inside the studio everything is controlled — the light, the temperature, the silence. Outside, everything is alive and moving and completely indifferent to what you’re trying to do. You have to adapt. Constantly. And that’s the whole point.

Plein air painting near the beach forces a kind of surrender that is different from anything in the studio. The light changes every ten minutes. The wind moves things. You can’t be precious. You get maybe an hour before everything shifts and whatever you were looking at no longer exists. So you work fast, you make decisions you’d never make indoors, and something gets into the painting that would never have found its way in otherwise.

You can’t plan a painting when the subject is in constant motion. That’s exactly why you should paint it.

I find something meditative about painting in open air that is different from studio meditation. In the studio, stillness comes from within. Outside, the stillness comes from disappearing into what’s in front of you. The world doesn’t stop — you just stop noticing yourself noticing it. That’s a good state to be in.

These works are looser, more urgent than the studio paintings. They have to be. And that urgency teaches me things I bring back inside.

Live Art: Fertz Chess Club, Dubai·2025

Live painting is a completely different experience from studio painting. In the studio you can stop, step back, leave the room, come back tomorrow. Live, in front of people, with music or conversation happening around you, you can’t stop. You have to commit. Whatever mark you make is the mark you made.

At the Fertz Chess Club in Dubai, the energy in the room was exactly what a live art session needs — focused and playful at the same time. Chess players understand concentration. They understand the tension between planning ahead and responding to what’s actually on the board. It’s not so different from painting.

In live art, the audience becomes part of the painting. Their attention is a kind of pressure — and pressure is interesting.

I love live art for the same reason I love playing music in a room with other people. There’s no take two. Whatever happens, happens in real time, and the imperfection of that is where the life is. A finished studio painting is a considered statement. A live painting is a conversation.

If you’re interested in a live art session for your event, exhibition, or space — get in touch. I’m always open to the right room.

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