Our daily space becomes a place of art

The works featured on this website represent only a small part of my output over 30 years professional practice, as artist, teacher and researcher. My purpose is always to bring art closer to us, into our daily space, so that our lives become ensouled and art-filled.

Originally trained at Tobias School of Art and Therapy in the Assenza approach, I expanded my practice to large-scale murals after a watershed invitation to work during the summer of 1997 with the Sektion für Bildende Künste at the Goetheanum. Although my time there was brief, it inspired a shift in my work that remains influential still today. All the murals and lazured spaces embody therapeutic indications from my art therapy training at Tobias, in the approaches of Margarethe Hauschka, Gerard Wagner or Liane Collot d’Herbois.

From 1998-2006, creating aesthetic and perceptually-rich spaces became my core practice, using special colour effects and murals to achieve a ‘painted space’ environment that ensouls the physical space and makes it breathe. Each painted space was tailored to meet client requirements and contexts. Although I rarely paint murals now, I still lecture on the importance of ensouling our home and workplace, to enable our souls as well as our bodies to breathe.

Like my artworks, my research focus in the visual arts is colour: its theory, nature and effects on our lived experience. Only through immersing ourselves in to the colour can we really experience them from within. Otherwise, we are always in danger of stepping back from the colour and conceptualise it. Our approach becomes intellectual, or else centred on self, only seeing colour in terms of superficial feelings. Only through immersion into the work – be it painting, pastel, mural, or drawing – can we really begin to know and experience its essential nature and how it speaks in the world. This is the core of the phenomenological approach to art – stepping forward into the it, rather than away from it and distancing ourselves from the works. And indeed, from the world.

My colour studies were foundational to developing the mural art  – all my art, really – and I continue to practice this structured exercise as an ongoing research practice. This process has also informed the creation of my later digital design work – websites, flyers and other forms of graphical representation of information – as well as non-digital visual artefacts, such as posters, illustrations, etc. Media include watercolour, pastels, gouache, pen, charcoal, acrylics, mixed media, varnishes and natural paints, any size and form from miniatures to spacious halls.

Some very early works are displayed on this site, as well as recent paintings, to reveal something of the biographical development of an artist. Please browse my works and contact me if you would like more information or to book a workshop. 

Murals

This collection of lazured spaces and murals represent the body of work from 1997-2006, including 9 major lazure mural commissions in medical environments and schools, covering over 660 sq.ms, in Belgium, Australia and New Zealand.

Colour Studies

A selection of colour studies from 1994-2021, these studies are the foundation of my process and of all my work. They are a research tool as well as artworks in their own right. These studies draw heavily on Steiner’s colour theory but also those of Goethe and the Italian artist, Beppe Assenza.

Thematic Art

An eclectic collection of works representing different styles and projects from 1992-2014. They have a strong illustrative theme, since many relate to literature and art history courses I taught in these years. All the drawings use chalk pastels.

Landscapes

 These works focus particularly on a training sketch given by Steiner to the artists, called ‘sunlit tree by a waterfall’. It is one of seven sketches used in anthroposophical trainings as studies. It has always captured my interest, more so than the other sketches of sunrises and stormy trees, perhaps because it is more complex. But the landscape is a recurring theme in my work, so has its own gallery. Most works are imaginative rather than representational, sometimes based on observational sketches but transformed in the studio. This selection shows my range of techniques.

Ikons Reinterpreted

Theses tiny ikons were inspired courses I gave on Byzantine Art techniques and Sacred Art. They are very small works, usually on matte and card, using chalk pastels and sometimes, gouache. The Madonnas almost all have zodiacal influences embodied in them, as they were created during the 12 Holy Nights during Christmastide, which itself lies under different signs of the Zodiac. They also distinguish between the nativity scenes of Luke and Matthew.

This works in this collection should be seen always as unfinished and ongoing, in a process of becoming. Nothing is ever truly finished and complete.