Could you start by telling us about your background and the journey that led you to become the artist, writer, and musician you are today?

I was born in 1975 in Exeter, Devon, to a drama lecturer father and speech therapist mother, but in 1984 they divorced and my father, brother, and I moved to Carmarthenshire in South Wales, where I spent my teenage years. I spent five years married in the 1990s, but following the death of my father in 1997, a move to the South East and other stressors, the marriage ended, and I went to art school for six years. Following getting my Masters in Fine Art in 2003, I moved to Istanbul for a decade, where I worked as a musician and teacher, and ultimately gave a TED talk. I returned to the UK in 2014, opened and closed an arts venue in one year, then started to write and make art about cultural politics in 2018 - a time of peak ‘culture wars’. 

In your statement, you mention that your new motto is ‘if it doesn’t look like it could have been made by AI, then it’s successful’. Can you deconstruct this statement for us? How has the rise of artificial intelligence changed your artistic philosophy and creative process?

AI is a menace. While digital technology has been useful for connecting people and making many aspects of life more convenient, it has a ‘boxing’ nature that is totally uncreative. What people are attracted to in art and creativity is the human element; when they realise it’s made by AI they quickly become bored, thus the ‘creative’ side of AI becomes nothing more than a temporary aesthetic fad. It also follows ‘narrative’ opinions on things, only being able to gather the information inputted by humans. This is entirely uncreative, unsoulful, and without a meaningful future. 

You describe your approach as "make, then see what I've made" with concept following production. Can you walk us through a specific piece where this subconscious-led process surprised you?

As a younger artist I had many ideas, and would go into them with a clear idea of how I wanted them to turn out. While this occasionally led to satisfying results, the more ideas I got out of my system, the more I realised the really exciting things happened when I didn’t plan, when I just ‘rode the wave’ of however I was feeling at that moment, and whatever I had around. A recent painting titled Mars: The Bringer of War was me with canvas in my studio, put the Holst piece on repeat, and just painting with the available materials I had at the time. The pencil I used to start it wasn’t a framework for what came later, it was just responding to the sounds I was hearing, and I overlaid all the other media in the same way. An action-music painting, without a pre-concept in mind.

You mention adding "what's happening in the present moment" to art history - how do you respond to current political crises through your visual work?

My main interest in this area is in justice reform, and how the media relates to, and to a large extent, controls that. I’m interested in ‘folk devils’, those who have been cancelled by a media that is increasingly puritanical and moralistic. Thus, I will try to capture figures who have been accused of various New Culture Crimes but are maintaining innocence, such as the Tate brothers or Laurence Fox, or those in political life who find themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the culture wars according to the current dominant narrative, such as Scott Adams or Andrew Doyle. While the subjects might (or might not) be well known, I try to inject a love of the process of painting into it, thus creating a visual experience as well as a psychological, mediated one. 

Could you tell us about your recent piece, Lucy Connolly's Family, and the story its visual narratives aim to convey?

Lucy Connelly is the wife of a Conservative councillor in the UK, who was imprisoned for two years following the Southport riots, themselves sparked by the murder of three young girls by 17 year-old Axel Rudakabana. Responding to fake news from India that Rudukabana was a Muslim immigrant, Connelly posted an inflammatory paragraph on social media, that she deleted a couple of hours later. Connelly and a handful of others around the UK were prosecuted for ‘incitement to violence’, many of them pleading guilty in order to receive a shorter sentence. This watercolour was an attempt to capture the fact that as well as being a flashpoint media story, Connelly was also a mother who had lost a child a couple of years previously.

Your latest book "SOCIETY (portraits)" suggests a focus on social commentary. How do you balance personal artistic expression with broader cultural critique?

They are the same thing. I express thoughts and impressions through art, whether that’s painting, poetry, lyrics or books and articles. Painting also has a ‘still’ quality to it, that allows the viewer to engage with an image without having to express an opinion on it, maybe prompting an internal dialogue. If I had to choose a ‘hierarchy of values’, as seemingly is the way of many corporations and focus groups these days, art would be at the top of it. I believe in catharsis more than judgmentalism, since no one knows what another has gone through - and it’s this thought, relating to the comedy of Ricky Gervais, that inspired my 2024 portrait of him. Gervais shared it with his 14million X followers, it was displayed at the 2025 Gerald Moore Gallery Open Exhibition, and was later awarded 2nd Place in the Cubist and Cubism category of the World Art Awards.  

You are the co-curator of the Innocence Art project with Dr Michael Naughton at the University of Bristol addressing justice reform - how do you see art's role in exposing systemic failures within the criminal justice system?

Absolutely key, but Innocence Art is as much about the ability of art to help those processing false allegations and wrongful convictions as exposing the machinery that led them to that place. Dr Naughton was sitting in the living room of a person maintaining innocence some twenty years ago, and observed the man’s large paintings of wild animals on the walls. The man explained how the paintings represented freedom, and Michael had the idea for Innocence Art then. We started to work together in 2022, after the Covid years, and found IA could express emotions and system problems in ways that worked beyond words. We are hoping that the Empowering The Innocent Conference 3, in 2026, will take the form of an art exhibition, with speakers involved. 

From your perspective, how do art and artistic creation bridge the gap between global societal and political issues and the general public?

We live surrounded by information overload, and competing interest groups, all competing for time, attention, and the money that goes along with it. At the same time, identity politics has had a terrible effect on Western discourse, as people box themselves into smaller and smaller identity groups, in order to be heard. This decline in human relations has happened in tandem with the rise of tech, particularly social media, which has been a notorious blessing and curse.

My paintings and writings are defiantly handmade, with zero interest in any ‘market forces’, and anybody who enjoys my work hopefully shares in that insistence on human individualism too. Societal and political issues are as personal as you choose to make them, and letting them too far into your psyche doesn’t always stand up to critical scrutiny. How did we survive for millennia without knowing what was happening on the other side of the world?

After two decades of professional practice, what advice would you give emerging artists struggling with authenticity in their work?

Don’t play to the gallery, make what you want, how you want, when you want, with whatever you have around you. Don’t throw anything away, even the most insignificant seeming sketches, and don’t paint over canvasses. I once binned my entire art school foundation year paintings when my ex wife and I broke up, seeing it as some sort of purification process. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made. Even the irrelevant, ‘failed’ pieces are part of a story, it just might not be clear yet. 

Lastly, what message would you like to leave our readers?

Resist all ‘groupthink’, from whatever political angle it is coming. Everything you’ve ever heard about yourself, good or bad, is just an opinion, not a fact. Society as it is may not appreciate art in a way that allows you to give up your day job or afford a new car, but it is no less valuable than the financial, civil or even health industries because of that. Be open to all creative ideas that present themselves to you, and practice ‘riding the wave’. 

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

The Brothers Tate, 2025, by Sean Bw Parker.

All images courtesy Sean Bw Parker