Oil on linen · One of one

Where light is laid on thick

A small atelier of impasto painting. Every canvas is worked wet into wet until the paint stands off the surface and the colour does the drawing.

View the collection Inside the studio

Painted, signed and shipped from the studio.

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  • Oil on linen
  • Palette knife
  • Wet into wet
  • Chrome yellow
  • One of one
  • Ultramarine

The collections

Three ways of looking at light

Night, bloom and water. Each collection is a different argument about what paint can do with the same sun.

01

Nocturne

Blue laid over blue until the dark starts to move. The star halos are built up in a spiral, so the paint itself turns.

Ultramarine · Chrome yellow

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Cypress, Turning Sky

02

Bloom

Flowers painted at the speed they wilt. Thick, hurried, warm — the yellow pushed until it is almost a light source.

Cadmium · Raw ochre

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Fifteen Heads

03

Water

No horizon and no bank, only the sky lying on the surface. Colour broken into small strokes and left to mix in your eye.

Viridian · Rose madder

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Pond, No Horizon

On the wall

Recent works

Each canvas is a single piece — once it leaves the studio it is not repeated.

All available works

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Inside the studio

Paint, before it dries

Two minutes of an ordinary afternoon: mixing on the glass, loading the knife, and the moment a colour finally sits right.

The atelier

A slow way to make a fast-looking painting

Impasto looks like speed. Most of the work is the waiting either side of it — the ground going on, and the paint coming back to dry.

  1. 01

    Stretch and size

    Belgian linen pulled over pine, sized with rabbit-skin glue and given two thin grounds so the weave still reads through the paint.

  2. 02

    Block the light

    The whole surface is covered in a single sitting. Nothing is drawn first — the shapes are found with a loaded brush.

  3. 03

    Build the body

    Wet into wet, knife over brush. This is where the ridges come from, and where most of the colour decisions are made and unmade.

  4. 04

    Rest, varnish, sign

    The canvas is left alone until the impasto is genuinely dry, then varnished, signed on the front and titled on the reverse.

Six tubes

Everything here is mixed from these

A deliberately short palette. Fewer pigments, more decisions. Hover a tube to wash the section in it.

  • Ultramarine The deepest blue that still reads as sky rather than black.
  • Chrome yellow Almost a light source. Used sparingly or it eats the canvas.
  • Rose madder Transparent, cool, and the fastest way to warm a shadow.
  • Viridian Cold green. Under water it becomes the colour of the depth.
  • Raw ochre Earth. Holds everything else together when the mix goes sour.
  • Titanium white Thick enough to stand up on its own and catch a real shadow.

Journal

Notes from the bench