"Do Life Drawing"

Wise words my mother, who was also an artist, said when I made my career move from Biology to art. This has stayed with me. I think of it as doing artistic aerobics. It keeps your hand eye co-ordination up to speed and lets you experiment with different media and get to grips with them.

There is a wonderful little Bohemian (i.e. falling down) club in Brighton that has been running drop in life drawing sessions for over 60 years. It is called the Sussex County Arts Club and I go every week to paint a portrait and do life drawing. It seemed only natural to use all this material in my work.

I had a life changing moment when I did a watercolour workshop with Graham Dean. He introduced me to Khadi handmade cotton rag paper and the technique of putting the tube directly at the paper then throwing water at it. This stopped my work from being too tight and getting bogged down in detail.

I use a very limited palette for my nudes of only 4 colours: paynes grey, indigo, burnt sienna and gold ochre. (I only use Windsor & Newton paints, I have tried others but they are not the same.)

I do all my watercolour life studies from drawings. I find it very frustrating waiting for paint to dry while the model is in front of you. You can be more considered and work on several paintings at the same time when working from drawings.

This approach is probably one of the reasons why I have had several commissions (none of which are on the web site) to do nude portraits, as it is so quick and easy for the model.

I have recently been doing oil paintings from life and love it. I find that you too can paint like Lucien Freud if you spent long enough and use a lot of flake white.

I have been running the portrait session at the club for about 10 years. During this time I have gone through every media. Now we are concentrating on oil painting, which take 4 weeks, so I am producing a portrait a month. Unfortunately, portraits do not sell very well unless the buyer actually know the person. However, it has given me the time to master most media. I much prefer to paint people than still life for practice.