I was born in Portadown in 1963, at the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Religion was not theoretical where I grew up. It shaped neighbourhoods, determined friendships, and etched lines into identities. I watched adults defend beliefs that many of them struggled to articulate. That contradiction — between inherited certainty and lived confusion — never left me.

I have been passionate about art, drawing, and painting since childhood. Forty years ago I studied art and design at Ulster University before life took me on a different path — falling in love, raising three children, and spending three decades travelling to over 65 countries, helping leaders build strong, purposeful cultures.

Now, after decades of leadership and transformation, I have returned to my first love. Living in Puglia, southern Italy, I studied at the Florence Academy of Art, working in the classical tradition while pushing toward something more personal — a visual language built from symbols, emotion, and the slow accumulation of a life examined.

My work is influenced by Gerhard Richter, Jenny Saville, Anselm Kiefer and Paul Klee. But more than any single artist, I am shaped by the places I have lived — the grey Atlantic light of Northern Ireland, the warm stone of Puglia, the streets of Florence.

This site is a studio made public. The paintings, drawings, and writings here are part of one ongoing search — for peace, for language, for a way to make sense of the world through mark-making.

“An artist in search of peace — searching for a language that mixes symbols with emotions.”