Ewie

I'm 42 years old, from the North of England. I attended an art college in my youth (Burnley College of Art, to be precise), for a year. After drawing and painting all my adult life and having folk tell me, "These are really good, ewie, you should sell them instead of just shoving them in a drawer ~ you're good enough to be a 'proper artist'", I finally succumbed to the nagging in 2006, having already set up a website in (erm) 2004. I had my first real-world exhibition at Taurus in Manchester (a bar/restaurant-cum-exhibition space) in November 2006; this was very successful and I'll be exhibiting there again in December 2007.

Now for the really tricky bit. I (still) prefer to think of myself as a creator of pictures or 'decorative artist' rather than an Artist-with-a-capital-A. My aim is fairly simple: to create things of beauty: I happen to find the nude male form beautiful hence that's my usual subject matter. My preferred medium at present is gouache ~ I love the opaque density of it, but it's surprising how something as dense and opaque can produce such stunning 3D effects; but I also regularly work in soft pastels (great when I feel a picture requires some subtlety, or a certain 'romantic' feel to it); graphite (coloured or plain: good for producing something quick such as a portrait); and, for large-scale canvases, acrylics. In all media I go for bright, bold, even gaudy colours, and enjoy experimenting with weird combinations and violent clashes. I do not consider (the vast bulk of) my work pornographic ~ I certainly don't intend it to be ~ I aim for an aesthetic rather than an erotic reaction. Huge generalization: I like my pictures to show men 'enjoying quiet moments', quite often in the solitary contemplation and/or enjoyment of their own beauty: the overall effect should be of calm even if the colouring is anything but.