The work behind the work - paintings; process, and the life around it.
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The work behind the work - paintings; process, and the life around it. ~~~~~~
The finished painting isn’t the whole story. This is where I work through where the work comes from, how it takes shape, and what it asks—both in the making of it and in the living with it.
Series & Projects:
(The stories behind the themes)
Studio Life:
(The storys that led me here)
For Collectors:
(Taking charge of your relationship with art)
Sereis & Projects
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Sereis & Projects ---
The Cafe Series
(or, The Barista at the End of the World)
What are these café paintings about, exactly?
Well, they began—like so many odd chapters in life do—just as the world was ending. Or at least thinking quite seriously about it. Maybe a few days before, depending on how you count. The first painting in what would become the Café Series started as a sketch I dashed off in February of 2020, while lounging in my favourite local café. The room was comfortably crowded, the coffee hot, the muffins gloriously overbaked, and somewhere—disturbingly far but ominously real—there were murmurs of an outbreak in China.
It wasn’t until the world snapped shut like a clam (or a government health directive) that I looked at that sketch again and felt a wave of unsettling nostalgia for something as simple, and suddenly as fragile, as sitting in a café. Thus Café Memories was born: a painting steeped in the wistfulness of warm spaces, idle chatter, and the terrifying question, Was I ever going to enjoy a muffin in public again?
When lockdowns eventually eased (or at least softened into a kind of bureaucratic shrug), I returned to my café. Or what was left of it. The baked goods were still warm, but the cozy atmosphere had been replaced by plexiglass barriers, floor stickers, and a circus tent outside with picnic tables that seemed only vaguely aware they were now part of the service industry. It was earnest, it was valiant—but it was a bit weird.
As I stood in line, waiting my turn like a compliant extra in a post-apocalyptic British sci-fi film, something caught my eye. There, through the warped reflections of the plexiglass and the canvas flaps of the café tent, stood the barista. She was slumped behind the counter in a pose of pure existential fatigue. And in that moment, I had a jolt of déjà vu—not just of cafés past, but of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
It was uncanny.
Naturally, I whipped out my phone (no time for a sketch—this was wartime art-making) and asked if I could take a photo. The barista, probably grateful for a reason to pause her routine of sanitizing the milk frother for the 117th time that hour, nodded. She didn’t pose, not exactly—but somehow she struck the precise, weary, enigmatic posture of Manet’s famous barmaid. Thus began Café Lockdown, a painting filled with masked echoes and hidden tributes. Look closely and you might spot a few Easter eggs in the background—my little nod to Manet’s masterpiece, filtered through the cracked lens of 2020.
Other paintings followed. Some captured the claustrophobic energy of crowded circus tents pretending to be outdoor cafés. Others tried to evoke the alienation of human beings trying very hard to connect while breathing through three layers of fabric and mild panic.
The Café Series became a kind of love letter—not just to the cafés themselves, but to what they represented: community, small comforts, the simple joy of people-watching while your muffin cools. Things we didn’t know we’d miss until they were suddenly—and bizarrely—gone.
Series & Projects
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Series & Projects ---
There’s More Than Just Running Here.
Running and I have a complicated history. Like most of my relationships with exercise, it started with good intentions and ended with a respiratory infection.
I took up running in my early teens, mostly because my dad was a marathoner and I was looking for common ground with the man who left when I was ten. Don’t get me wrong—he was a good dad, just not there every day. We needed something to share. Running seemed like the obvious choice. Something besides genetics and a mutual fondness for coffee.
Later in life, I trained for the Around the Bay 30k in Hamilton. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the oldest road race in North America—older than the Boston Marathon. This apparently makes it historic, though it doesn’t seem to get you a discount on the entry fee. I trained through a Canadian winter, which in hindsight was not my brightest idea. By race day, I had a chest infection and chronic bursitis. My lungs felt like wet accordion bellows.
I finished the race. Technically. I ran it, anyway. But somewhere between kilometre 23 and existential collapse, I realized something important: I didn’t actually love running. What I loved was the connection it gave me to my dad. I was trying to retrace his steps—literally.
What stuck with me most from that day wasn’t the race itself. It was the people watching it.
The spectators. The cowbell shakers. The “You’ve Got This!” sign holders. The woman who locked eyes with me around kilometre 27 and shouted, “You’re almost there!”—an outrageous lie, but exactly what I needed to hear.
I came back the next year. Not to run, but to cheer.
I stood at kilometre markers with my camera, watching strangers pour out every ounce of themselves while being lifted by people who didn’t even know their names. I started sketching. Photographing. Thinking: This is what I want to paint.
Not the runners, exactly. Or at least, not just the runners. What moved me most were the people on the sidelines—the ones cheering for the last-place straggler with the ambulance crawling behind him just as passionately as they had for the elites. It wasn’t the triumph of sport that got to me. It was the humanity. The spontaneous, generous instinct to lift one another up.
That’s the real subject of these paintings—not competition, but encouragement. A behaviour so beautiful and underrated it almost feels like a spiritual act. In a world obsessed with being right or being first, here was a place where strangers clapped for you just because you were trying.
I decided to paint one scene for every kilometre of the Around the Bay race—thirty in all, plus the start line, for a total of thirty-one paintings. It took years. Each race day, I’d head out along the course, take a dozen or two photos at each marker, and return to the studio to stitch something together from the best of them. I work in acrylic because I make a lot of mistakes and acrylic forgives quickly. Also, I paint in the massage clinic I run, and oil paint smells like something decomposing in a bath of paint thinner—not the vibe you want during a relaxing back treatment.
The Around the Bay series was finally completed and shown in 2019 at the community gallery in the Hamilton Art Gallery. It felt like a personal finish line. I had painted the race I could no longer run, and in doing so, I found a better version of the thing I’d been chasing all along.
And then, on the opening day of the show, we got the call: My stepkids’ father—had passed away.
I don’t know what to do with that coincidence, except to say that art and grief seem to walk hand in hand more often than we expect. One opens us. The other fills the space. Or maybe it’s the other way around. What I do know is that it drove home something simple and unavoidable: my family is the most important thing in the world to me, by a wide and startling margin. The art world would have to wait.
Eventually, I started a new series based on the Boston Marathon. Bigger race. Bigger crowds. American mile markers, which threw off my rhythm at first—but I adjusted. I’ve finished seven paintings so far. The process is the same: follow the race, take 12–24 photos at each mile, and build a composition from the best of them.
I don’t know when the Boston series will be done. And that’s okay. I’m not in a hurry. I’ve stopped running toward things. These days, I mostly walk toward them, take a few photos, and go home to paint.
But I still believe in showing up. In cheering. In witnessing. And in the simple, stubborn beauty of people who choose to lift each other up—even if it’s just with a cowbell and a lie about how close the finish line really is
Studio Life
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Studio Life ---
The Giant and The Mirror
Picture this: a quiet, shy kid slouched in the back row, never doing his homework, eyes half-focused on lessons that might as well have been in Sanskrit. The chalkboard was a blur. The only thing that made sense was the doodle spilling across the margins of his notebook, blooming like a vine in spring. That kid? That was me.
One day, the regular teacher was absent, replaced by the principal—a towering, bearded figure who looked like he’d stepped out of Norse mythology. Naturally, I tried to disappear. No eye contact. No sudden movements. Just survive the day.
Then… thud. His finger landed on my doodle. My heart stopped. This is it.
But then a soft, surprisingly gentle voice:
“That’s beautiful.”
Wait, what?
I dared to look up. His eyebrows had softened, his face calm. Approval? From him?
“But you need to do the math, son,” he added with a grin.
Fair enough. That was his job. But in that tiny moment, he cracked a door I hadn’t known existed. Maybe, just maybe, I had something to offer the world.
I never really found my stride academically, but art became my lifeline. The one thing I was good at. The thing that made sense. It became my identity. So when high school ended, art school felt like the obvious next step.
Art school in the 1980s was a hazy dreamworld. The vibe: art is everything. Which, I eventually realized, meant art was also… nothing. If everything is art, how do you actually see the world? I felt like I was living inside a mirror, endlessly reflecting myself.
I needed to step out of that mirror. I needed a real job. A life that mattered—not to the art world, but to people.
In 1993, my mom passed away—a loss that left everything feeling off-kilter. Around the same time, I was taking an anatomy course at massage therapy school, originally to improve my figure drawing. Two very different experiences, quietly shaping the path ahead.
I quickly became captivated by the human body—not as lines on paper, but as an intricate, living system. The student massage clinic became more than practice; it became a place where I could make a real difference, and even find a bit of healing for myself.
It was then that it clicked: this could be the thing. A way to connect, to do something meaningful. So I dove in, trained as a massage therapist, and never looked back.
For a while, I thought I had left art behind for good. But about 15 years later, something started gnawing at me. Not regret exactly—but incompletion. So I dusted off the old paint set.
This time, art wasn’t my identity. It wasn’t something I needed to prove. It was an old friend - someone I could share a life with.
Now, I have a family I love, a career I believe in, and that old easel standing by my side. Not as a crutch. Not as a mirror. Just… there. Waiting for the next story to tell.
For Collectors
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For Collectors ---
The Ugly Ducklings of Your Art Journey.
Do you want to paint or make art, but every time you try, you end up staring at what you’ve created with the kind of quiet horror usually reserved for expired yogurt?
You are not alone. In fact, you are in excellent company—every artist in the known universe (and at least a few in alternative universes) has felt this way. We call it “The Disappointment Phase.” It’s a bit like puberty for your creativity: awkward, confusing, mildly humiliating, but absolutely necessary.
Now, here’s the bit no one tells you: you’re supposed to make bad art. Not just once, but repeatedly. Heroically. With gusto. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to produce what I shall lovingly call Thirty Crappy Paintings.
Why thirty? Well, because it sounds official. But honestly, the number’s arbitrary. Could be 12. Could be 97. Could be an entire gallery of storm clouds that all accidentally look like potatoes. The point is: you can’t skip the bad ones.
But here’s the magic: each one brings you closer. Each “failure” is just another rung on the ladder, another brick in the absurdly wonky foundation of your future brilliance. You are not failing—you’re composting. And compost, as it turns out, is excellent for growing things.
And about talent—let’s talk. People love to whisper about it like it’s some kind of mystical birthright, handed out by celestial art fairies. Nonsense. Talent is nice, sure. But give me a hardworking plodder with a pencil over a “gifted” dabbler any day. Talent might get you to the starting line. Work ethic gets you to the finish.
So go ahead: make the bad stuff. Make it boldly. Make it while swearing under your breath and questioning your life choices. And then make another.
Because somewhere in that glorious, messy pile of “not quite right” is the artist you’re becoming.
For Collectors
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For Collectors ~~~~~~
You Seem Like Someone Who
Might Accidentally Start an Art Collection.
(Warning: This Blog Post May Contain Trace Amounts of Sales Pitch)
The art you collect says as much about you as it does about the artists behind it. In fact, your collection—whether it lives on your walls, your bookshelf, or your bathroom door (no judgment)—is basically your inner world made visible. It’s like interior decorating… with a soul.
Now, let’s address the obvious: not everyone has the budget to buy original art. Most artists understand this. In fact, many of us are painfully aware of the tragic twist that we ourselves often can’t afford our own work. It’s the ultimate plot hole in the “successful artist” narrative.
That’s why a lot of artists (myself included) offer work at a variety of price points. There are canvas prints, fine art giclées, open and limited edition runs. Some pieces come as postcards, mugs, or pillows—because nothing says “I support the arts” like resting your head on someone’s weird little bird painting.
And here’s the thing: a good art collection doesn’t need to be made entirely of originals or curated by a moody man in round glasses. You don’t need a gallery budget or a degree in art history. All you need is curiosity, a bit of wall space, and a willingness to live with images that speak to you (or at least raise a charming eyebrow at you while you eat breakfast).
When you start small—maybe with a print or a piece that makes you inexplicably happy—you begin to notice what you like living with. You get to know your own taste. You start to understand why you’re drawn to certain colours, moods, or subjects. And when the time comes to invest in something bigger, you’ll do it with confidence. You’ll know that piece belongs with you, and why.
And hey—if one of those pieces ends up being mine? That’s wonderful. Truly. I promise not to get emotional. (Or at least not until I’m alone with a cup of tea and a spreadsheet.)
For Collectors
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For Collectors ~~~~
Lets Make A Deal.
Every now and then someone tells me they’d rather buy directly from the artist—cut out the middleman, save a bit of money, maybe help the artist more. They usually say this right after expressing mild outrage that galleries take around 50%.
I get it. On the surface, it sounds like a raw deal.
But here’s the part most people miss.
If you’re buying from a hobbyist or someone dabbling, sure—pay what feels fair and carry on. No harm there. But if you’re buying from an artist who is actually trying to build a career—someone in it for the long haul—the gallery isn’t a parasite. It’s a partner.
An artist’s livelihood doesn’t hinge on a couple of one-off sales. It depends on sustained exposure, credibility, and—most importantly—a solid relationship with the gallery representing them.
Now imagine this: the artist sells you a piece for less than the gallery would charge. That undercuts the gallery directly. You’re not sticking it to “the system”—you’re quietly sawing off the branch the artist is sitting on. Galleries don’t love that. In fact, they tend to respond by dropping the artist altogether. Fair enough.
Okay, so what if you pay the full gallery price, but buy directly so the artist keeps the extra? Sounds better, right?
Short term, maybe. Long term, not really.
When a gallery sees work selling through them, they pay attention. They promote that artist more. They give them better placement, more shows, more visibility. That’s how careers grow. When sales happen off the books, that momentum disappears. The artist might win a little today and lose a lot tomorrow.
As for that 50% cut—yes, it’s significant. It should be. Good galleries earn it. They don’t just hang work on a wall and hope for the best. They build relationships, market the artists, talk to collectors, and create the kind of environment where the work actually gets seen—and sold.
So when you find a piece that speaks to you, and there’s a gallery behind it, remember: you’re not dealing with a middleman.
You’re looking at a team.
And if you want to support the artist properly, support the team that’s helping them build something that lasts.