I wouldn’t be able to put a number on the amount of times Utah has inspired my work. There is no doubt as to why so many of the great film directors took their movies to the area to use the landscape to enhance their art… just as I have done.

Monument Valley! The moment Olga and I drove over the crest to reveal this view for the first time was breathtaking. It is hard to capture this in a photo, an artwork and now I know the same for a Hollywood film. Nothing will ever do it justice other than the real thing. All I can do as an artist is my best to bring it to life to maybe inspire my viewers to go.

This particular artwork is a collage of two images from the area.

It is always odd how an idea strikes me. Everyone and everything has its own battle in life. A plant seeking water, a lizard hoping for sun, a vulture hungry for scraps and in this case for a human… a valley to cross. Looking over this valley I submerged deep into thought as to how I would get across, why would I cross, who would cross, what if I slipped, what if, what if, what if…… and it goes on.

My ideas are born from this process. A valley in many ways represents human struggle. We all have to cross our own valley in life and in many ways it is a game. What is our next move, how many moves ahead am I, can I win the battle or should I just forfeit? We are all arguably in our own games of life and we can choose to play it in any way we like… but in the end we all have to play it.

This piece represents our own individual valleys and if the game is played right, we will find out what is over the other side.

I created this idea in December 2019, and at the time my female character had a plague mask on. Very coincidental. However, I felt that in 2020 with our new reality of living in a pandemic, the plague mask took on a whole new meaning that was not suited to my original vision. To soften the blow and possible negative reactions, I removed the mask for this piece and added the skull I have used in so many pieces now.

The skull represents room for growth, rebirth, and in many ways it will lead up to a series I want to explore about ego. We cannot grow as individuals if our egos are not checked.

I don’t want to go into explaining the process in this piece as you can see it was clearly an intricate little puzzle for myself. I wanted to challenge my concentration and technique in this piece. My hope was to drive myself deeper into a painterly technique which I somewhat achieved. To do this piece in total realism would have been a nightmare, so evolving my technique was forced into action.

So on that note… Here is a little bit of insight for you into the development of myself as an artist.

I did well in highschool as an artist, but it was my singular love of the art that let the rest of my subjects down, therefore not having a high enough grade to get into art college…. Go figure right!

Anyway, this path led me into the military and several random other jobs that required discipline and strength to get through.

On September 12th 2001, 6 years after leaving highschool, I took my first art lesson in graphite drawing. It was totally technique driven toward realism. From there came the pastels, the oils, the acrylics, then abstract, landscape, still life and slowly fantasy and surrealism kicked in.

At this stage I was very good at colouring in between the lines and making things look more realistic than I had ever hoped. This was exciting for me as my visions were now coming to life. I was not close to where I wanted them to be, but the discipline I had learned in the military made sure that I would never alter my path, and I would simply keep grinding away day in day out to hone my skills.

The thing about this, and to relate it back to this particular piece, I was sadly missing one of the most important skills that no one had ever mentioned to me, or even knew how to show me. This was how to be a painterly painter! I know right… WTF does that mean? I hadn’t been to art school, so in many ways I was travelling the art world blind folded doing my best to take in every bit of information possible, but never having true mentorship or guidance.

Painterly to me these days means perfect confidence in one's painting ability. I admittedly still see myself as an advanced colourinerist, and I work constantly to grow my painterly signature. This comes from hours and hours of life drawing, timing myself, experimenting with new approaches, and I promise you that as the years go on, you will see me loosen up.

A loose and confident paint stroke to me is what I consider to be a painter. If you truly understand what I mean by this, you will not find very many artists by my definition out there. I have so much admiration for anyone who has a highly developed painterly stroke.

Thankfully my beautiful wife Olga was painterly before she even came close to finding her voice as an artist. This is a conversation that we have almost on a daily basis about how to break me out of the tyrannical grip of realism.

The funny thing about this is that painterly and realism can be done together, but it is like walking on a tightrope between the two. In most cases I am likely to fall off to one side and lose my balance, in turn killing the effectiveness of the artwork in question.

A lot like everything in life when you think about it really.

Anyway, here are some process images.

Thank you for reading until the end. I am your fan!

Monumental Move