Artist in Search of Peace, is my visual journey through consciousness. Created through trance and meditative drawing, these works emerge not from design but discovery — each line a conversation between instinct and awareness.
I was born in 1963 at the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Religion was not theoretical. It shaped neighbourhoods, friendships and identities. I grew up watching adults defend beliefs that many struggled to articulate. That contradiction stayed with me.
I attended art school in Belfast in the early 1980s but left to pursue what was considered a practical path. In business I discovered capability — I could read people, build, lead. That path took me around the world and provided for my family. It was a meaningful chapter.
But it did not quiet the visual language that had begun much earlier.
My return to painting was deliberate. Training at the Florence Academy of Art was a disciplined reset. I needed to rebuild my technical foundation before I could dismantle it with integrity.
Now my work moves between structure and disruption. I return repeatedly to symbols — crosses, circles, architectural spaces — not as religious statements but as investigations. I am interested in why humanity constructs gods and myths, and how those systems of meaning shape identity, loyalty and division.
Having relocated from Ireland to Nardò in Puglia, I paint at a distance from the landscape that formed me. That distance allows examination without nostalgia. My work explores containment, inheritance and interior space — not as escape, but as integration.
I am not painting for recognition. I am painting to develop a language that feels honest to the life I have lived.
This chapter may be shorter than the last.
It is no less important.
