"After a career in marketing & advertising in the corporate world, it feels like I should've been doing this right from the start. The whole process of thinking through a painting from concept to finish feels completely natural to me and so fulfilling.
As an artist I've always felt an outsider, out of place, unable to fit into societal norms. I tried for years to deny my own sexuality and to be like other people thought I should be.
Inevitably eventually this led to a moment of madness at forty years old, leaving my childhood sweetheart wife and two sons in their teens.
Moving to Brighton to open a hire dungeon and explore my repressed sexuality and BDSM. Starting a relationship with an ex-Buddhist Nun, who turned my life upside-down! Delving into the darker side of life, finding the real me. After ten years of exploring the new me, finally feeling like I fitted into something... I started to paint, it felt like an epiphany and the response has been amazing. I've sold paintings and prints around the world, into private collections and worked through commissions from all kinds of sources. Winning first prize at EAL19 OXO Wharf London.
Now I'm trying to paint things that elicit some kind of emotion within myself and perchance they touch something in you too... that taboo, to strive to make it a little more understood, maybe even acceptable..."
Don't buy art to try and make money, buy it because you...
LOVE IT!. Guy.
From very early on I’ve had an interest in the darker side of life. A goth at heart you could say. I quickly realised this was not the normal, that I was different and that I should keep it secret. Keep the real me hidden away from others.
But I also noticed the hypocrisy of humans, on the one hand they reviled the darker side of human nature and on the other hand news papers and articles in magazines or on TV, or all fiction, that used that darker side, sold more and was of a fascination to people. News papers in particular sensationalised stories based around kinky sex and if it also involved murder or torture or force the sales rocketed and they milked it for all it was worth. People feign revulsion, but they cannot avert their gaze and interest.
It is this hypocrisy that I’m trying to explore in my art. Obviously its based around my sexuality and my own experience of having to try and deny it within myself for years. I’m kinky, my fantasies revolve around having control in the bedroom but I could never even contemplate sex with someone that I’m not entirely emotionally connected to and in love with. I can honestly say I’ve never wanted to actually harm anyone out of anger or dislike, only love. And even then never outside of the bedroom or consent and nothing that will leave a mark that lasts longer than a few days.
Therefore my quandary has been to try and work out, that as 'Kinky', why I would naturally be categorised along side murderers and psychopaths and perverts worthy of prison sentences and why as an open minded creative artist we are forced to split our lives in two by closed minded bigoted individuals unable to accept another point of view in the world.
So, I’m going to announce this quest, to explore that difference, that hypocrisy and my youthful dilemma that took me a lifetime to overcome… …to paint that story, challenge those perceptions and maybe make that path just slightly easier for the next person to follow... (and undertake commissions to earn a living! ;-) Thank you.
Inserting Fetish into Fine-Art