Although I have always been creative, my reason for becoming an artist is simple. In 2023, I had a mental breakdown, a big one. My amazing wife Abbey slowly helped bring me back to functioning. She got me some paints, sat me down outside at our favourite place (Cawsand) and told me to paint. I did, and I haven’t looked back.

Since then I have worked and worked and worked at becoming a very good painter. I have learnt, analysed and absorbed knowledge, refining techniques and understanding, developing my practice and learning how to translate our brain’s way of seeing through paint.

I have been deaf since birth, and I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and these both play a big part in my artistic development. Did you know that a deaf person’s brain is wired for vision more than a non-deaf person? Part of my auditory cortex has been devoted for processing vision, meaning I “see” with more of my brain. Being deaf has made me extremely sensitive to visual clues. I seem to notice things which others don't, and this helps me to translate light, shapes and temperatures into paint. The ADHD side make me extremely sensitive to sensory inputs. Feelings like wind, cold, textures, warmth, these speak to my brain in a constant and unrelenting way - which is difficult to deal with on a day-to-day basis, but excellent for becoming aware in a landscape and translating all of these feelings into paint.

It feels a bit odd to write this, but I think that without deafness and ADHD, I would never have had the ability and chance to become the artist that I am.