Oil Painting

Selected Oil Paintings

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Ongoing personal practice

Oil, charcoal, and mixed media on canvas & paper

2020 — present

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Painting is where I study people and places with my hands. Unlike a design brief, each canvas starts from direct observation — a street corner, a moment caught in changing light — and lets me spend hours refining a single gesture, shadow, or palette without a client or deadline in the frame.

The street and city work grew out of walking around Toronto with a camera. I take photos, then work them up on canvas as composite scenes — a falling figure, a stranger under a purple umbrella, a street lined with exposed pipes and wires. Composing these pieces is the closest my painting practice gets to graphic storytelling: scale, hierarchy, and implied narrative all doing work together.

The symbolic and textured pieces (the green poplar canvas, the industrial landscape) are looser experiments in mark-making, layering, and mood. They're the ones where I give myself permission not to plan — to let the brush decide, and see what imagery surfaces.

The Victoria Park series is a small set of plein-air studies — each canvas painted on location in a single sitting, working directly from the subject without later reworking. It's the kind of discipline a screen can't teach: committing to what's in front of me and moving on.

Design is rational work — every brief has an optimal solution, constraints to resolve, systems to align. Painting is the opposite: an intuitive, free-form practice where I look for order inside chaos, deciding in the moment instead of in advance. Running both in parallel keeps me honest about which mode a problem actually needs.

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