About
I paint because it is the best way I know to make sense of the world, and to stop making sense of it.
The work begins with observation. Real landscapes, buildings, roads and skies come first, and the improbable arrives later, through the painting rather than ahead of it. The result is not dream imagery but a world with its own internal consistency, where the extraordinary is met matter-of-factly.
I work in Acryla gouache: flat matte colour, confident line, complementary contrasts pushed past naturalism and held together by one warm accent.
Separate series share a single vocabulary. Avis Aeromechanica invents an aviation-derived natural history with its own mock-Latin taxonomy. The Starling Reformation nocturnes sit at the eleventh hour. The Rurban landscapes occupy the seam between farm and suburb. Apertures and impossible structures open onto elsewhere. A figure in a red shirt and broad-brimmed hat moves through most of them, not as protagonist but as witness.
The theme underneath is that the world carries on regardless of us. Time, weather and chance run to their own rules, and ordinary life continues beneath the absurd, the ominous and the unexplained. The paintings are less about catastrophe than about how people keep walking through uncertainty. Rooted in the Cape vernacular, governed by their own quiet logic.
Every painting on this site is a physical object. Real acrylic on real canvas, real watercolour on real paper. None of the images are AI-generated. I get asked, so it is worth saying plainly. If you want the longer version of how AI does and does not figure into my process, I wrote about it in Painting with a Critic.
The essays on this site are not about art. They are about things I care enough to write down: governance, technology, how institutions work or fail to. They are here because this is my site and these things matter to me.
Galleries and collectors can browse the full catalogue: title, medium, support, size and year for every piece, with a downloadable CSV.
Elsewhere on the web:
The Insect Hotel, my other creative playground.
Ai Runtime Security, my professional work in security.