Some background...   

I was born and brought up in Derry, N Ireland, and after graduating in Dublin worked as a community worker in Belfast during the Troubles. Eventually I'd had enough and sought refuge in London, then travelled for a while before settling in Scotland.

I suppose I got the artist bug from my father, watching him sketching in the wilds of Donegal and painting oil landscapes on canvasses (propped up on the family piano). I developed a passionate interest in drawing, fascinated as a kid by the work of adult cartoonists like Giles, Searle and Thelwell, and spent hours scribbling my own efforts on wads of paper that my father brought home from work.

From the late 1970s I attended evening classes and summer schools at the Edinburgh College of Art, and for the past five years I've worked in the WASPS studios in Edinburgh, mentored by the former ECA tutor Paul Keir.

For some time I have been developing a more abstract and expressive approach to my landscape painting and drawing, and more recently have started exploring the possibilities of stone lithography.

My working method is to sketch and photograph outdoors and then work up the material into more finished drawings and paintings back in the studio..