watercolour paintings, medieval miniatures and fine art prints
I am a watercolour artist based in Twickenham, UK. I take much of my inspiration from nature and particularly love to paint rainfall and water. My work sometimes hints at an unspoken narrative, inspired by my love of literature and a childhood spent poring over illustrated children’s books.
I’ve been creating art, in one form or another, for most of my life. Like most creative people, the need to make things runs deep, whether this be paintings, patchwork quilts, knitted jumpers or bars of soap. My artistic journey has been influenced heavily by my love of art history, which led me to spend a number of years experimenting with different materials, from oils to egg tempera and gold leaf, learning from the techniques used by artists in the past. I still carry a lot of that learning with me today, though, nowadays, I tend to work almost exclusively with watercolours and ink.
In working with water-based paints, I’ve learned to loosen up a little and relinquish some control, embracing the unpredictable, letting the materials do their own thing and taking pleasure in those ‘organic’ blooms on wet paper. I particularly enjoy the cyclical notion of using the flow of water and pigment on paper to depict rainfall and oceans.
With every painting, I strive to capture a particular mood and to embrace the beauty of the world around us. An English sky heavy with rainfall and gloomth is a scene of beauty to me and I’ll merrily spend a day immersed in pounding rain, while the sun shines outside my window. Spending time inside a painting takes me outside of everyday life and nothing makes me happier than sharing that moment with an onlooker.
In the last year or two I’ve been having a lot of fun creating my own little tributes to the weird and wonderful illustrations found in the margins of illuminated manuscripts of the 13th & 14th century. The humanity and humour of the artists and scribes that created these books really comes to life once you start noticing the margins. You can find my medieval miniatures for sale in their own little shop (see link above) and at my special instagram account: @twicanhom.miniatures
My love affair with medieval and renaissance art began in earnest when I studied History of Art at university and fell head over heels in love with Giotto, van Eyck and Fra Angelico. I found myself gripped by a desire to know more about the physical craft involved in creating these Italian and Flemish masterpieces. With help from various brilliant teachers, including Dr David Cranswick and Dr Helen DeJean, I spent some years learning how to emulate the techniques of the old masters, preparing a gesso ground, grinding paints from earth pigments mixed with oils, resins and egg tempera, building up a painting in a series of glazes and applying gold leaf to a panel. I still enjoy dabbling in these traditional techniques, alongside my watercolour work, and can never resist the temptation to work with gold leaf.
I’ll finish by saying that all of my paintings are created using the finest quality professional-grade artists’s materials, to ensure that the finished artworks will stand the test of time. I love to work with 100% cotton paper and always favour pigments that have an excellent lightfastness rating. My watercolours are framed behind UV-filtering gallery glazing and my miniatures are made with 23.75 carat gold, which will never tarnish.