About the Cover Artist

Every Painting is an Abstraction

I am a professional painter and photographer with a PhD in theoretical informatics from the University of Nottingham, UK (2011). I worked as a research scientist at top universities, including Oxford, King’s College London, and Sheffield, before leaving academia for a full-time career in art, painting, and, recently, photography. I took 3 years of intensive training in classical drawing and painting and since 2017, have worked independently as an artist.

I love abstraction—it is what we do when we think—a language with an alphabet, words, and grammar. Abstraction is not vagueness, uncertainty, or hesitation; it is precision of expression and omission of irrelevant detail. Every painting, even very literal realism, is a statement in the language of painting and speaks clearly when the language is understood and used creatively. A successful painting is a very precise incision, saying. “this is what this is, to me.” My goal is to develop a new contemporary painting language building on painting languages of previous generations.

My Practice

I work at my studio in East London, peoples’ homes, and outside. I find oils the most luminous, transparent, and forgiving of all media. Painting in oils is very natural. I love color. I work mostly from observation, with live models, and sometimes abstractly by free improvisation along an idea, an impulse. I love painting people, and most of my works are portraits or figure paintings. I’m always looking for the abstract in them but also always look for the concrete in my abstract work. One day they’ll meet in the middle.

The #ThinkHand Campaign

In 2019 and 2020, commissioned by and in support of the #ThinkHand campaign, I painted portraits of people living with MS—a condition I share since my diagnosis in 1996, during my first year at university. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the importance of hand function in MS, and 6 women and 1 man answered my call for models. The cover image is from this series. My paintings are started from life, because I like to meet in person before painting someone. Then I finish the work in the studio. Everyone in this series wanted to be painted happy and smiling, and still, I couldn’t stop some melancholy from creeping into the paintings.