Posted by | February 27, 2025

Statement

Photo Credit: Rennie Brown

I am a Vancouver artist with an expressionist style inspired by Saturday morning cartoons and MAD magazine. I like to take familiar urban scenes and re-imagine them with a bright mix of caricature and idealism to counteract the grey dystopia we sometimes seem to be living in. I make buildings look like living things and my stylized distortion of architecture often represents the people who inhabit the buildings and neighbourhoods. I use whimsical instability, saturated colours, and distorted perspective to reflect the madness of a constantly changing environment.

While my paintings seem celebratory and nostalgic, there is always a bit of darkness in my work. Art should communicate a universal human experience that ranges from joy to despair to endurance and sometimes we need a reminder of what the magnitude of that experience looks like. I’ve learned that you can’t control the world but you can interpret it and I choose to emphasize the colour and character and electricity of life.

My hope is those who like my work get a jolt of familiarity.

Biography

Photo Credit: Josh Hines

I grew up in a pulp mill town in BC’s interior. My art teachers were often exasperated because I wanted to go by instinct, which means I am mostly self-taught. The stereotype of the starving artist combined with the 80’s recession scared me away from art and steered me towards Vancouver where I got a degree in English and studied practical things like Computer Science, Finance, and Marketing. I still painted but my poor roommates had to put up with a lot of somewhat gothic subject matter over the years. With every new painting I hung on the wall, they’d tactfully suggest that I should get some fresh air and sunshine. Painting was my way of working out frustration at a world I couldn’t control.

I took a temporary corporate job to pay the bills for sixteen years. I painted sporadically and eventually rarely between various systems projects. Eventually, years of travelling in binding business suits and never seeing the sum of my efforts add up to anything more than my bank account made me feel like I was starving in a different way. I was becoming detached and cynical rather than passionate and optimistic and I no longer believed that what I was doing was relevant.

So I started painting again and this time I focused on local subjects and things I knew. Art should communicate a universal human experience that ranges from joy to despair to endurance and sometimes we need a reminder of what the magnitude of that experience looks like.

In 2008, I made painting my full-time career. I work out of The Beaumont Studios in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia.