Were you interested in art from an early age?
The first time I was influenced by anything regarding art was seeing my dad draw aeroplanes. I loved the way he constructed angles and the way he drew the specific parts of the plane. I was around 7 years old then.
Did you start drawing after that?
Sometimes I would be given a piece of paper by my parents and told to just get on with drawing and the great thing about that is, there is no right or wrong. You can draw a plane, for example, any way you want to draw one. It is just up to your imagination.
Did you do art at school?
Yes I did, although that comes a fair bit later on. I went to Campbell College in east Belfast, and that was a school where they encouraged you and they nurtured kids who might have struggled with the standard academic subjects but were interested in subjects like art. You were supported to think differently, to think about things other than just academic subjects.
I boarded there and that was really interesting because when you are left to your own devices, and there are grounds to walk around in, you can start to develop your own ideas and thoughts.
Were you given support?
I was encouraged because I was quite good at art. And I really enjoyed that subject. Now I was still just reproducing images, in fact there wasn’t much more than that, it was an approach which said can you make your drawing or painting look like the image you are working from.
I did get an award; a GCSE True Colours Award, and my work was exhibited in the Ulster Museum.
Did that award keep you interested?
Encouragement does matter because you need to be able to think that there is a pathway for you in what you are doing. I was taught a little bit of art history, and I looked at contemporary art through Google Images. I liked skateboarding and there was a Californian artist called Gordon Shmet and he painted these classic converse shoes, just floating in mid-air, which I really liked.
There was another painting he did, “Clothes without a Mannequin”, with clothes painted just floating inside the frame, which I liked and because I liked his work I emailed him back and forth, made contact with him. That was actually part of the syllabus. You had to keep in touch with someone and eventually we had a family trip to California and I actually met him.
What about support at home?
I was just quite self-driven in that art was what I wanted to do, and it was my highest grade at GCSE and A Level. Eventually I ended up at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, a few hundred metres from where I am now, where my studio is located, in the Cathedral Quarter.
How was that experience?
I did the Foundation Course in the first year, and that was really useful because that made you think through your ideas, challenged you on what might be considered right and wrong, and I was able to try lots of different art forms, work in lots of different mediums.
And you just gravitated towards painting?
I was able to test out many ideas and many ways of thinking but I just always wanted to paint, to be an artist. I achieved a First in my Honours Degree in Fine Arts and the Belfast School of Art bought one of my paintings.
Do you have any major influences?
A very early influence on me was Francis Bacon, and I’m not really sure what it was that impacted me. I think, possibly, the directness of his work. I think Bacon’s paintings sort of look back at you, and they have a penetrating element about them.
They tread the fine line between illustration and representation and once you get over the initial viewing, the intensity of the images, there’s also many underlying themes within the paintings. So his paintings have both a mystery and a directness, combined with a peculiar intensity.
Any other influences?
There were also tutors at the School of Art like, Paddy McCann, Dougal McKenzie and Louise Wallace. They were all at the School of Art at that point in time and I sure they had an impact on me and possibly other painterly painters like Matisse.
