Deciding when a painting is done is not easy. You don’t want to give up too early, and you don’t want it to have the life crushed out of the work either. I think my paintings largely te…

When I was young I briefly toyed with the idea of as a career as an architect. Then I laughed when someone told me about the level of math I would need. I never knew if that was true or not, especi…

I knew I was going to paint this the moment I saw it. It somehow reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting as a shaft of sunlight cut between the buildings and illuminated a lone person. I’m s…

Recently attending an on-line workshop with the Artists’ Network in Toronto, there was considerable discussion about marketing our work. If there was a point that needed underlining, it is th…

And now for something completely different, well, almost. I wanted to challenge myself with a painting that would be as much from my imagination as it was from reference sources (eg. photos). I als…

When we first moved to our present house slightly less than 20 years ago, the intention was to set aside a room I could use as my studio. The house seemed enormous to us at the time, although when …

I got notice today that it has been two years since I subscribed to Duolingo, an on-line language tutorial app. At first I was using it to prepare for an upcoming trip to Portugal, then once we ret…

I was rather shy as a kid. While I had friends, I was okay with my own company too, playing with my Corgis, gluing together model airplanes, flipping through a book or making a drawing. My mother s…

This is probably the worst sales pitch ever. The second painting of mine to be completed in 2026 has to be among the saddest I’ve ever done, although I have been thinking about it since I sna…

I don’t really do pastoral images largely because it is not really my lived experience. I’m an urban dweller, and most of the places I like to visit are urban. I decided almost immediat…

I get tired just thinking about it. It’s about storms, both metaphorical and real. Instead of making art, I find myself spending hours clearing snow from around the house, and in between, pre…

Years ago I responded to a call for entry to a show at the Eastern Front Gallery that explored the colour blue. The invitation came through my involvement with the Riverdale Art Walk, having partic…

When I entered Toronto’s Scarlett Heights Collegiate Institute in the early 1970s, I thought it was normal that a significant proportion of the school’s art program was in art history. …

Some good news that is a little embarrassing. It got little attention in Ottawa’s fall budget but will impact artists going forward. Canadian artists have been fighting for it for years. In t…

When we first arrived at Glasgow’s Burrell Collection we got offered a tour before even taking stock of where we were. Given the somewhat disorientating layout of the building, it turned out …

Recently I found a copy of Kate Bryan’s new book “How To Art” while in Waterstone’s in Glasgow. It turns out, the signed copy also had an extra chapter on Banksy that was ex…