It started with an eye, drawn in ink. Pen to paper, no sketches beforehand, moving from one mark to the next to see what would appear.  

My monstrous Townsfolk are an evolution of my long love of the eerie and unusual. A Townsfolk character might originate from a mental image or feeling, or take inspiration from the found imagery that I collect: historical costume, artwork, vintage photography, documentation of plants and animals. These all merge into new chimeras of my own making, and while some of them may be disquieting or monstrous, it is essential to me that they all have a sense of individuality and character to ground them, no matter how strange they may appear.  Beginning as ink drawings, over time these drawings have coalesced into a growing body of work that developed its own interconnected narratives and mythology as I collaborated with local authors and was in turn inspired to create new artworks. In recent years I have expanded the scope of this project again, this time painting in oils to create new characters and revisit existing ones. The Townsfolk are each a surprising combination of friendly and fearsome, handsome and hideous, funny and unfathomable. The characters’ individual quirks invite the viewer to look closely and imagine these folks’ strange stories, finding common ground with the monstrous and otherworldly.