Oil Painting
A continuous personal practice running parallel to my design work — self-portraits, urban scenes, and surreal compositions in oil, charcoal, and mixed media.
Ongoing personal practice, 2020 to present. Oil, charcoal, and mixed media on canvas and paper.
Where graphic design is about clarity and system, painting is where I slow down to observe colour, light, and human form directly. These canvases inform how I think about hierarchy, texture, and atmosphere in every design project I take on.
Studying with my hands
Painting is where I study people and places with my hands. Unlike a design brief, each canvas starts from direct observation — a street corner, a moment caught in changing light — and lets me spend hours refining a single gesture, shadow, or palette without a client or deadline in the frame.
Composite scenes from walking Toronto
The street and city work grew out of walking around Toronto with a camera. I take photos, then work them up on canvas as composite scenes — a falling figure, a stranger under a purple umbrella, a street lined with exposed pipes and wires. Composing these pieces is the closest my painting practice gets to graphic storytelling: scale, hierarchy, and implied narrative all doing work together.
Letting the brush decide
The symbolic and textured pieces — the green poplar canvas, the industrial landscape — are looser experiments in mark-making, layering, and mood. They're the ones where I give myself permission not to plan: to let the brush decide, and see what imagery surfaces.
Plein-air, one sitting each
The Victoria Park series is a small set of plein-air studies — each canvas painted on location in a single sitting, working directly from the subject without later reworking. It's the kind of discipline a screen can't teach: committing to what's in front of me and moving on.
Rational work, intuitive work
Design is rational work — every brief has an optimal solution, constraints to resolve, systems to align. Painting is the opposite: an intuitive, free-form practice where I look for order inside chaos, deciding in the moment instead of in advance. Running both in parallel keeps me honest about which mode a problem actually needs.
