Biography
I started making art again in 2001 after retiring as a wildlife cinematographer. Because I was originally trained as a sculptor and photographer I spent five years teaching myself to paint and in 2005 I started making paintings based on portrait photos I made of young men and women I knew from affluent backgrounds. I completed ten of these paintings between 2005 and 2010 without knowing precisely what my intentions were.
Around the end of 2010 it struck me that I’d been painting portraits of people at a condolence call. A good friend had just died and it was then that I began to understand that this was to be a radically troubling dystopian narrative. I painted three paintings the following year in a very dark color palette. The hardest part during the first year was to get used to embracing such a dark idea and to commit to pursuing the idea further.
It has grown into a series of portrait paintings and fiberglass sculptures that I call The Performance Anxiety Neurovirus (PAN).
