A Portfolio of
Curiosity
and Craft

I started drawing because I wanted to understand things. Not in the way that science understands things — through measurement and proof — but in the way that looking understands things: slowly, partially, with the knowledge that you will never quite get there. A cracked egg is not just a cracked egg. It is a lesson in translucency, in the relationship between form and gravity, in the way light behaves when it passes through something fragile.

My practice moves between close observation and free invention. On one side: still life studies, animal portraits, landscapes — work that asks me to look carefully and respond honestly. On the other: surrealist compositions, character studies, imagined worlds — work that asks me to trust what emerges when rational control is relaxed. I need both. The discipline of observation teaches me to see; the freedom of invention teaches me to feel.

I work across many media — pencil, watercolour, acrylic, oil paint, ink, digital — because I believe that the choice of medium is itself a creative decision. Watercolour teaches humility: you cannot control it entirely, and the best results often come from accepting what the water does. Oil paint teaches patience: it rewards those who wait. Pencil teaches precision: there is nowhere to hide.

What unites all of this work is a commitment to sustained attention. I am not interested in art that is made quickly, or that settles for the first idea. I want to make work that has been thought about, reworked, questioned, and — eventually — accepted as the best I could do at that moment.

I want to study fine art at university — ideally at a school that takes both technical skill and conceptual thinking seriously. I am drawn to institutions where art history and studio practice are taught in dialogue with each other, where students are expected to know why they are making what they are making, not just how.

In the next two years, I want to develop a more coherent body of work — to move from a portfolio that demonstrates range to one that demonstrates depth. I am particularly interested in exploring the relationship between the hand-made and the digital: how traditional media and digital tools can inform each other rather than compete. My first sustained digital painting (the mountain landscape in this portfolio) was a beginning, not an end.

I also want to engage more seriously with art history and theory. I have been reading about the Surrealists, about Japanese aesthetics, about the history of still life painting. I want to understand where my own instincts come from — which traditions I am working within, even unconsciously, and which I might choose to resist.

Most of all, I want to keep making things that surprise me. The best moments in my practice are the ones I did not plan — when a wash of watercolour goes somewhere unexpected, or when a character I invented starts to feel like someone I know. That feeling of discovery is what keeps me at the desk.