Introduction

The thing that motivates me to draw and paint is a desire to make pictures rather than art. As a child I always drew cartoons and as a teenager I became very interested in comic strips and graphic novels. But I was never very interested in writing my own stories or illustrating someone else’s. What I did like was the form of the storyboard. I like the idea that in any frame we are seeing the results of the previous set of frames and the anticipation of what will follow in the next.

I use characters that appear to come from stories in my pictures but they usually only exist in a particular work. I certainly don’t create whole histories or conclusions to their lives, nor would I have a situation clearly defined from the outset. I enjoy inventing characters, involving myself in fake mythology and tackle the technical challenges that spring up. I certainly prefer to be surprised by what I have done. I hope to trigger different stories depending on people’s own set of associations and experiences. However, most of all want people to like it as a picture.

My work is a marriage of daydreams, observation and reconstruction. As a child I would build, demolish and rebuild miniature road networks in the garden based on the routes observed in my 40-mile round trip to school. Now these childhood activities have re-emerged as a crucial research methodology for my work. My current practices take as their starting point sprawling suburban estates and cities built on monumental panoramas – both improvised and real. My drawings follow the same thought processes as I did as a child creating elaborate environments to add buildings, people, narratives and the occasional 1970s TV science fiction reference.