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Why teapots? people ask me all the time. Well, it's a long story... but briefly:

I like to paint flowers, and I like to have a vase of flowers in the centre of the painting. That usually means that there's a space on the tabletop on either side of the vase. So you need something there to balance the picture. What better than a teapot on one side and a bowl of fruit on the other? That's the usual format.

Sometimes the teapot itself suggests a painting. It's a little aesthetic game, if you like... a teapot, a few flowers, and a background is enough to make a painting. It's just about shapes and colours; you try to harmonise them to create a mood, or to please the eye.

I love the idea of genre painting... that you work with the traditional subject matter artists have used for generations. Landscapes, portraits, vases of flowers (and by now, abstracts...) How you paint within these limitations is up to you. Personally I like 19th century pre-Impressionist painting, and keep to a fairly straightforward realist technique in my own work. But that doesn't mean that I don't love the flower paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard and Matisse, or that I'm not aware of the wonderful work the Russian Impressionists have been doing over the last fifty years. It's just that I follow my own inclinations to paint clear naturalistic shapes in simple colours.

Eventually I will set up links to flower painters I have discovered on the net as I have been preparing my lectures for students at Rørvig Folk High School in Denmark.

To see figure and portrait drawings and landscape paintings, please visit my other website.

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I do not sell paintings from this website. You can find examples of my work at the galleries listed here