THIS PORTRAIT BEGAN LIFE as a pile of old magazines: pages full of colour, text and typography just waiting to be reimagined. I’ve always loved how collage can transform the ordinary into something co

I STRUGGLED INTO MY LAYERS, picked up my light sketching kit and off I went up into the hills behind where I live. I wasn’t the first to arrive; halfway up the hill I could already hear the cries of e

SOMETIMES MAKING LIFE SIMPLER FOR YOURSELF and avoiding overthinking a process gets you further. In painting terms, using flat colours does exactly that and it may even prove to hold the key to more c

From rustic barns to Riviera villas, Pablo Picasso’s studios were engines of invention. Picasso: From the Studio at the National Gallery of Ireland, in partnership with Musée national Picasso-Paris, t

Every painting’s varying subject matter and scale offers us distinct opportunities and challenges. Before I start any project, I like to consider what I want to convey, what opportunities and challeng

My life in the cheese world stemmed from a geeky fascination with microbial life and how those living microbes can change a food product. I started painting through a fascination with soil microbiolog