Predominantly a landscape painter, Michael is inspired every time he steps outside. Brought up on the Suffolk coast with views of the North Sea, he was profoundly influenced by the ever changing landscape and he believes it was the wilderness of that coastline that shaped his work. He notices every detail and processes everything he sees through his artistic eye, seeking out scenes that have a wide variety of colour and tonality. He is fascinated by the dynamic created by the sky, particularly when it is, as he says with a smile, “doing something crazy”.
Michael’s work has been described as expressive, bordering on abstract. He has a natural tendency towards abstraction, but is curbing this in his recent work which concentrates on expressing the beauty of a landscape. He works in a vibrant array of mixed media including oil, pencil, charcoal, pastels and ink, building an expressive and vital world of colour and light with multiple layers and textures on the canvas. He regularly paints on location which changes the palette he uses because the colours are so immediate and bright. Working outside also influences the way he works, making the final composition representative of a scene, whereas when he works in the studio for a whole piece the work becomes more abstract. The scale of his paintings prevents him for working entirely on location, but he creates a portfolio of photographs and sketches as well as committing the colours and the quality of light to memory before moving inside. My work is like a collage of different elements brought together to create one landscape.
Michael studied art and art history at the University of Lancaster. Although painting was a huge part of his life from the beginning, he started to “reluctantly” climb the corporate ladder and became Global Communication Director for the L’Oreal Group in Paris. This high-flying position involved extensive travel, and the extremely creative organisation continuously fed his mind with ideas and inspiration that were grist to his creative mill. Every year the company hosted an amateur art exhibition in Paris which Michael participated in, and in 2010, he decided the time had come to quit corporate life and focus full time on painting. He has never looked back.
Michael has his main studio in in Saussignac, a beautiful village in south west France. He loves to head over to the Mediterranean coast – mainly Montpellier – where the light is famously extraordinary. He also travels regularly to Dubai and Italy where he sets up pop up studies, and has a penchant for any coastal areas, particularly the Algarve, as he finds the combination of the ocean and the light inspirational. In 2014 he spent three months painting in Australia where he set up a pop up studio in Sydney, and he is currently planning a second trip.
