Process · Experiment · Reflection
Here's the place where I talk about ideas becoming paintings, prints, paper clay, experiments and, occasionally, complete failures. Not every piece becomes a finished artwork. Understanding that every piece teaches me something means my studio is simply brimming with work, but in the polished grid of Instagram so much of it just gets lost.
Over the years, the sheer variety of workshops I teach has also meant that my own work has gradually slipped into the visual background. From the outside it can look as though I'm mainly teaching, when in reality the two are constantly feeding one another. What I discover in my own studio inevitably finds its way into the workshops, and questions or experiments from the workshops often send me back into my own work with fresh eyes.
There are simply too many ideas, experiments, discoveries, thoughts and end results that become blanketed over by the expectation of polished social media. Yet every one of them has played its part. Every experiment, whether successful or not, leaves something behind. Sometimes it's only years later that you realise just how important it was.
For me, Dialogue in Flux isn't simply the title of a body of work. It emerged from the realisation that time doesn't really have a place in the creative process. Forty years after leaving art college, I found myself naturally returning to ways of working, marks and conversations that I hadn't consciously been pursuing, only to discover that they had never really left me.
There is a dialogue within each artwork: between colours, forms, marks, materials and the placement of every element. That dialogue gradually finds its own conclusion as a piece reaches the point where it has nothing more to say. But the conversation doesn't end there. Every finished work begins a new dialogue with the next piece, and another with every person who stands in front of it.
Looking back, I can also see that Dialogue in Flux reaches beyond the studio. It reflects a life shaped by living in Ireland, England and Germany, where each place, culture and way of seeing has left its mark. Rather than replacing one another, they continue to exist in dialogue, quietly informing not only the work I make, but the person making it.
The dialogue is never fixed. It moves between ideas, materials and finished works. It moves backwards and forwards through time, revealing connections that often only become visible years later. It continues between one artwork and the next, and begins all over again with every new viewer who brings their own experiences, memories and interpretations to the work.
This little corner of my website exists because Instagram simply isn't built for that kind of conversation. It favours polished outcomes, neat grids and finished pieces. My own studio, however, is anything but neat. It's full of unfinished work, abandoned ideas that suddenly become useful again, discoveries I hadn't been looking for, and experiments that quietly change the direction of the next painting.
So this isn't really a blog in the traditional sense. It's a place to record the conversations that happen before, during and beyond the finished artwork. A place where the experiments, the questions, the failures, the discoveries and the unexpected connections have as much value as the paintings themselves.
So, for those who are interested in what happens before a painting reaches the wall—or why one piece unexpectedly leads to another—here it is.
Welcome to my Studio Notes.
14 July 2026 - Looking Back to Move Forward.
Sometimes you only recognise a journey once you stop and look backwards.
That's exactly what happened to me this week.
Mind you, the journey itself didn't begin this week. Nor did it begin with the gelli plate.
It properly began last October, when I suddenly recognised something that had quietly been unfolding over many years and finally gave it a name: Dialogue in Flux.
Once I'd recognised it, something else happened.
I became curious.
If this really was the way I naturally work, would it survive moving from one medium to another? Would the same visual language still emerge if I stepped away from painting for a while? Could a print lead to a painting, a painting suggest another print, and both continue the same conversation?
I certainly wasn't the first artist to work like that. Picasso did. Kirchner did. Many artists have allowed one medium to feed another, moving backwards and forwards between printmaking and painting, each informing the next. Rather than seeing them as separate disciplines, they become different voices in the same conversation.
That thought stayed with me.
Ironically, my own conversation with the gelli plate had begun years earlier.
Back in 2021, a good friend made me a homemade gelli plate. I was absolutely delighted
......and then put it in the fridge.
For two years.
I was genuinely intimidated by it. Why? I honestly couldn't tell you. Somehow I'd convinced myself I needed to know what I was doing before I even started.
Eventually curiosity got the better of me.
By 2023 I was properly exploring the process and, before long, had moved on to commercial plates. Like so many people, I became completely absorbed. Layer after layer, ghost prints, stencils, masks, textures, colour, transparency, happy accidents and complete failures. Hours disappeared without me noticing.
And I loved it.
I still do.
There is something wonderfully liberating about a process that constantly surprises you. Some prints seem determined to fight back, others suddenly reveal something you couldn't possibly have planned. It is play in the very best sense of the word.
But gradually something changed.I stopped seeing the prints as the destination.
Instead, they became part of a much bigger conversation.
Over the past months I've deliberately moved backwards and forwards between printing and painting, allowing one to influence the other without worrying too much where it might lead. Sometimes a print suggested a painting. Sometimes a painting sent me back to the plate. Sometimes neither survived, but the next piece somehow carried a little of both.
That was exactly the point.
Looking around the studio now, I can see the thread far more clearly than I could while I was making the work. Some monoprints feel complete enough to stand as finished works. Others have found their place within mixed-media pieces. And then there are my recent acrylic paintings on paper. They aren't gelli plate prints at all, yet I can immediately recognise how those months of printing have influenced them. The confidence to crop harder. To simplify. To layer differently. To leave more unsaid. The influence is there, even when the plate itself isn't.
Perhaps the gelli plate didn't teach me to print quite as much as it taught me to edit.
That feels like a much bigger lesson.More importantly, it confirmed something I'd only begun to suspect last October.
Dialogue in Flux isn't tied to one technique.
It isn't about painting.It isn't about printmaking.
It isn't even about materials.It's about the conversation that happens as one idea naturally leads to the next. Sometimes that conversation takes place within a single picture. Sometimes it continues between different works. Sometimes it moves effortlessly from one medium into another before quietly returning again.
For the first time, I also feel these pieces have reached a point where I'm genuinely happy to call them fine art. Not because they're made with a particular process, but because they've found their own place within my practice. They no longer feel like experiments sitting beside the paintings. They belong alongside them.
Five years ago there was a homemade gelli plate sitting dauntingly in my fridge.
If someone had told me then that it would eventually become one voice within an ongoing artistic conversation, I'd probably have smiled politely and closed the fridge door again.
Thankfully, curiosity won.
August 6th 2026 - Granny Graffiti – A Wall That Tells Our Story
Three weeks have somehow disappeared since the last blog post.
Not because nothing has happened, but because everything has happened at once.
Sometimes making art doesn’t begin with paint. Sometimes it begins by moving furniture, emptying cupboards, carrying shelves, and wondering why on earth I thought changing five rooms at once was a sensible idea.
Before I even began the graffiti, the house itself became a project. Five rooms were reorganised all at once. The workshop gained more space, I finally created a small area for my own work, the office was separated from the rest of the house, a combined living and guest room took shape, and, at last, I can now work on the small private dining room. It was an enormous amount of work, but it was all part of creating a home that works for us.
The graffiti belongs to that transformation.
It will fill a part of the wall of the new dining room, becoming part of the everyday backdrop of family meals, conversations and celebrations. It isn’t intended to impress visitors or imitate the bold statements of street art. Instead, it is becoming something far more personal—a visual autobiography told in the language of graffiti.
It celebrates who we are, where we have come from, the people we love, the next generations growing up around us, and the countless little things that have shaped our lives.
Nothing has been chosen simply because it looks good.
Everything has a reason for being there.
Pippi Longstocking is a reminder of childhood independence, courage and imagination. The Jellycat rabbit is rather special. It happens to be the favourite comfort toy of both my granddaughters, despite there being twelve years between them. One fell in love with the cream-coloured rabbit, the other with the blue one, so it seemed only right that their comforter should carry both colours. Stitch makes me smile because his whole philosophy is simple: 'Family: Nobody gets left behind'. The sword will find its place because one of our grandchildren is Arthur. I am planning a kestrel, as it is part of my earliest memories. Carrying a kestrel for the family business of The Falconry Of Ireland, Clonmel at the age of three, and learning from my grandfather how to deeply observe to get know the bird. One of his mottos always was 'if it's worth doing, then it might as well be done right'. I still carry this inside me.
Other elements are still waiting their turn. Some already exist on the wall; others are still quietly forming in my imagination.
The word PEACE sits close to the centre. Not as a slogan, but as something worth striving for within a family, within a home, and what we have been lucky enough to experience in our generation, in Europe at least - so far for our life time. Fingers crossed it will continue, for the next generations to come too.
At the moment it probably looks rather chaotic.
That is because it is.
Graffiti, like many paintings, often grows one thought at a time. Mine is doing exactly that. Background colours are still changing. Some areas have already disappeared beneath new layers. Others will almost certainly be painted over before I am satisfied. The wall is still finding its own balance., and I my way with spray paint !
For me, that uncertainty is part of making art.
The finished painting is only one moment in a much longer conversation.
Perhaps that is why Dialogue in Flux continues to feel like the right name for my work. The dialogue isn’t only within a painting. It happens between memories and ideas, between one generation and the next, between past and present. It continues while the work is being made, and it doesn’t stop when the painting is finished. Every person who stands in front of it brings something of themselves and discovers something different.
This wall is no exception.
It is not really a graffiti wall.
It is a collection of memories, values, humour, influences, family stories and small moments of joy, all slowly finding their place alongside one another. It is growing much as families do - not according to a plan drawn on day one, but one layer at a time.
So this isn’t a post about a completed artwork.
It is simply a snapshot of a wall that is still becoming itself.
I’ll show you where it ends up.
But first, it still has quite a journey ahead.
August 25th 2026 – Back to the Airbrush – Old Tools, New Conversations
It’s nearly the end of August, and after what feels like a month of absolute heat, I’m beginning to find my way back into the studio.
The days often started reasonably well. Mornings were still possible, but by afternoon the heat became debilitating and doing anything remotely productive felt increasingly ridiculous. The garden dried to a crisp. There was hardly any grass left and even the moss looked as though it was hanging on by sheer determination. Across Europe there were reports of drought and forest fires, particularly in France, and the heat seemed to become part of the background to everything.
Thankfully, we have a pool in the garden, and that became something of a lifesaver. A few dips during the afternoon made an enormous difference. Otherwise, afternoons were largely given over to reading, doing very little and simply accepting that this is, after all, what holidays are sometimes for.
Then my daughter and two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter came to stay for a week, and suddenly the garden became interesting again for entirely different reasons.
When you spend time with a toddler, you don’t really decide what you’re going to do in the garden. You follow.
Whatever took her fancy, we followed too.
It was a lovely week, and a reminder that sometimes doing very little in terms of work doesn’t actually mean that very little is happening.
Now, though, the end of August
is approaching and I can feel
the shift. Autumn isn’t far
away, workshops will begin
again, and I’m starting to think
about what I want to explore
next, both for myself and with
the people who come to work
in the studio.
And, following all the upheaval
and room-changing I wrote about
in my last Studio Note, my own art
room is finally ready to be used as
exactly that – my workroom.
That feels far more important than simply having another room with a table in it. Over the years I’ve found one particular thing incredibly disruptive to my own work: constantly having to clear it away. Art materials, equipment, half-finished pieces, little experiments and, perhaps most importantly, the ideas attached to them all had to be packed up whenever the space was needed for something else.
For workshop-related work that was never quite the same problem. There was a purpose and a deadline, so I knew exactly what I was coming back to. My own work was different. I might have been halfway through exploring something, clear everything away, and by the time I brought it out again I had lost the thread of what I had been doing with it. The physical piece was still there, but the conversation I had been having with it had gone.
The result is that I have accumulated quite a number of started projects over the years.
Now I have somewhere where they don’t have to disappear.
I can leave something on the table, walk away from it and come back the following morning – or several days later – and it will still be there, surrounded by the materials, colours, scribbled thoughts and experiments that belonged to that particular moment. I’m rather curious to see what difference that makes to my own work.
This year has already brought quite a lot of experimentation: jelly printing, marbling, developing my paper-clay recipe and gradually learning what that material will and won’t do.
And now I’m adding something else.
The airbrush.
Except, of course, it isn’t really something new at all.
Back to 2009
I bought my first little airbrush in 2009. It was a cheap one, nothing sophisticated, but it arrived at quite an important point because it was part of my finding my way back to making art.
At the time I was going to quite a few motorbike gatherings and became fascinated by the artwork painted onto the bikes. I took loads of photographs. It wasn’t simply the technical skill that interested me. Seeing all that painted imagery made me want to make things again myself.
So I had a go.
A few attempts from that time still exist. I have one and my daughter has another in the UK. They’re nothing fantastic, but that really isn’t the point. They are little markers of a particular moment – evidence of me finding my way back.
And now, seventeen years later, the airbrush has wandered back into the story.
Sometimes returning to the studio doesn’t mean beginning something new. It means rediscovering something you put down years ago and finding that, somehow, it has been waiting for you.
Learning so I can share it
Last month I gave my young prodigy Anton a little airbrush for his birthday. With autumn approaching and the kids returning to the studio, I thought it would be rather nice to hone my own skills again.
He may already have had a little play with his by then. Either way, when he comes back we can experiment together, compare notes and he can have a go with some of the other associated equipment and materials I have in the studio rooms.
And, rather surprisingly, I already have quite a collection of airbrush inks.
That’s because I’ve never really thought of them as belonging exclusively to an airbrush.
I’ve used them for splatters, drawing and washes, dropping them into water and watching the pigment dissipate and flow. I love that unpredictability. I’ve also used them quite a lot within my Dialogue in Flux work, making abstract, rough or expressive lines directly from the little nib inside the bottle.
They appeared in some of my finer illustrative work too, particularly the Joie de Vivre illustrations I made around 2019–2020.
So the inks themselves have been moving in and out of my work for years.
Perhaps now I’m simply returning them to the tool they were originally intended for.
Something to aim for
When I’m experimenting, I like to have some sort of end result in mind. I don’t particularly enjoy practising a technique purely for the sake of practising it. I want a reason to find out what it can do.
I’ve rediscovered an acrylic painting on canvas that I started a few months ago and then apparently forgot about. It’s quite a meditative piece, and I want to put an expressive sentence across it using the airbrush.
So that’s my first little project.
It gives me something to practise towards while still allowing me to play around with pressure, lettering, inks and whatever else occurs to me along the way.
And because it’s still the summer holidays, I can do a little bit here and there while talking to family, drinking coffee, wandering away from it and coming back again.
No pressure.
Just experimenting.
I’m also curious to see what the airbrush might do with the paper-clay work I’ve been developing. I genuinely don’t know yet, which is rather the point.
Perhaps it will allow me to build very fine layers of colour across the uneven surface. Perhaps masks and stencils will work. Perhaps the sprayed colour will emphasise the surface rather than hide it. Perhaps it will work alongside drawing, ink, collage or some of the other processes I’m already using.
Or perhaps it won’t work at all.
That is what experimenting is for.
Whether any of it eventually becomes part of a workshop remains to be seen. It might. It might not. I generally need to play with something myself first and find out whether there is enough in it to take further.
And the wall is still growing
The graffiti wall from my last Studio Note is still very much in progress too.
I used ordinary spray cans for some of the background work and really like what they did, but indoors they are less than ideal. They smell, and the aerosol particles have an extraordinary ability to settle on absolutely everything.
So the airbrush may find its way onto the wall as well.
I’m not going to explain all the elements again – that was the story of my last post – but the wall continues to develop in exactly the way I hoped it would. Things are being added as they occur to me, some areas are changing, and there is still a great deal more to come.
Perhaps the airbrush will give me another way of adding those finer layers without filling the dining room with spray-can fumes.
And that seems to be where I am at the end of August.
Not starting again exactly, but returning.
Returning to the studio after the heat of summer. Returning to workshops and thinking about what autumn might bring. Returning to an airbrush I first picked up in 2009. Returning to materials I already know and wondering what else they might be capable of.
There is something rather satisfying about discovering that a technique I played with all those years ago hasn’t really disappeared from my practice at all. It has simply come back around at a different point, alongside different materials, different ideas and considerably more experience.
Which is perhaps why I never really think of my
work as a straight line from one thing to the next.
Things disappear.
Things return.
One experiment leads somewhere unexpected,
an old idea suddenly becomes useful again, and
something I learned years ago begins a completely
new conversation.
So, for the moment, the airbrush is back on the table.
Let’s see where it takes me.
