I was pleased to be part of the group exhibition Mind Climate which featured four artists whose work focussed on ecological issues and revealing the often unseen undercurrents and shifts in perception and how our inner worlds are deeply connected to the people and the environment around us. I exhibited two works from my series of eight paintings ‘Art for Planet Earth’ – Protesting with a Paintbrush – about the current environmental crises and social issues facing our world: B

Every artist, writer, photographer, sculptor has a creative process. Carl Jung said that art was an innate drive that seizes the artist and makes them its instrument. I think that for many artists it can be quite a tricky thing to describe. Here’s me in the studio chatting about my creative process with two of my recent abstract paintings in the background.

ONE PAINTING. ONE STORY. A GREEN DESERT. It’s a heart break. Evolution has taken millions of years to create our tropical forests and it is taking human beings five minutes to destroy them. All the animals who live in these forests are totally dependent on this ecosystem: jaguars, tapirs, parrots, toucans, orangutans, golden tamarin monkeys, snakes, frogs, and many more. In this painting the animals are staring at the lumberjack with an axe and chainsaw who’s about to chop do

You may be interested (or, more likely, horrified) to learn that in 2017, at the bottom of the Pacific’s 10km deep Mariana Trench, considered the deepest part of the world’s oceans, a robotic submersible found, wait for it ... a tin of Spam, a bottle of Budweiser and plastic bags! Additionally, scientists discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the crustaceans living in the pitch-black waters of the Trench which go all the way up the food chain to whales, dolp

We’re so lucky aren’t we? We turn on the tap and water comes out. We flick a switch and the light comes on. Rubbish gets collected. Supermarkets are full of produce which trucks deliver along functioning rail and road networks. Most of us can heat our homes, feed our kids and fill up our cars. Our infrastructure works. At the moment. But things are unravelling: the planet is warming up year on year through man-made climate change; we have appalling levels of sewage in our wat

Six out of thirteen of the great whale species are currently classified as endangered. This painting is a story about our beautiful gentle giants of the sea – the flash of a tail, a plume of vapour, breaching the surface – an unforgettable sight of these magnificent creatures. But in my painting the whale on the left is swallowing plastic pollution as it feeds. The middle one is trapped in fishing nets. On the right you can see barrels of toxic waste. The whales are at risk f

Who is burning down the Amazon rainforest? The story in this painting is just one of the ways humanity is destroying the planet: the torching of a rich and complex ecosystem. On one side there’s an evil looking bloke who’s the culprit, representing the money and profit to be gained by this devastation. A box of matches, a flaming stick, burn it down, hey ho, who cares? On the left is what’s lost in this mass of smoke and flame: an indigenous man looking at the loss of his hom

Common experiences of astronauts were a feeling of awe for planet Earth, a profound understanding of Earth’s fragility, the indivisibility of human, plant and animal worlds and a sense of responsibility for taking care of our home, this glowing, blue jewel in the darkness of space filled with stars, planets and swirling nebulas. The woman in the painting is cradling the Earth, highlighting its beauty and vulnerability, and gazing down with sorrow, concern and tears for the th

Migration is very much in the news nowadays but it’s been an issue for hundreds of years: even the Romans also had debates about what to do with migrants. Now people are fleeing not only war, oppression and famine, but the effects of climate change have increasingly become a significant driver of people seeking asylum, often referred to – somewhat clinically – as ‘environmental displacement’. In this painting I needed to express the link of migration to global problems and ‘t

I doubt many visitors to my exhibition will remember the pea-soup smog that enveloped London in 1952. This painting is a story about how much pollution is pumped into the atmosphere by coal burning power stations – then and now. The noxious smog in ’52 brought home that the pollution wasn’t escaping and people died from the toxic fumes. Today burning fossil fuels and releasing their carbon content is one of the major contributors to air pollution and climate change, heating t