Art & Life

The part that isn’t trying to be useful

This page is the side note. If you came here to assess me as an engineer, that’s the other page — this one is just what I do with the rest of my attention.

Most of it is drawing: graphite, ink, coloured pencil, and mixed media when I lose patience with precision. Looking back at it, I seem to keep drawing glass vessels and whatever is trapped inside them — octopuses, figures, cut flowers. I didn’t plan that.

There is a camera too, loaded with film, which enforces the same discipline drawing does: commit to the frame before you know whether it worked.

Works

Drawing & painting

Select any piece to see it larger.

Five graphite drawings of octopuses arranged inside tall glass vessels, rendered in fine detail on white paper. — Vessels I — Octopus studies

Graphite on paper

A finished mixed-media painting of five glass vessels containing figures, set against a ground of dense multicoloured dots, photographed hanging above a black-draped table. — Vessels II — Figures in glass

Mixed media on board

Overlapping charcoal life-drawing studies of the human figure, worked over with vivid orange, green, blue and red marks and small floral motifs. — Figure studies with colour

Charcoal and mixed media

A page of dried stems drawn in charcoal and graphite — thistle heads, seed pods and sprigs of small dark leaves scattered across white paper, with faint handwritten pencil notes running between them. — Dry stems, with notes

Charcoal and graphite on paper

The developed botanical piece — the same five plant arrangements now set inside coloured glass vases — propped on an easel in a busy art studio, with other students' paintings stacked behind it. — Vessels III — Botanical

Mixed media · in the studio

A bouquet drawn in soft pastel: scarlet flowers, yellow button blooms and blue cornflowers among dark green foliage, standing out against a ground made of thousands of small grey dashes. — Bouquet on a dashed ground

Soft pastel on paper

Photography

Shot on film

Thirty-six frames, no screen on the back, and a few weeks before you find out what you got. It teaches you to decide before you press the button.

A long concrete building faced with vertical slats, ivy climbing halfway up it, one figure standing on the pavement in front and a street lamp in the foreground. — Slats and ivy

A two-storey house clad entirely in a patchwork of chevrons cut from painted metal and old signage — blues, black, white and orange — with mismatched chairs set out on the sand in front of it. — Chevrons

A cable-stayed footbridge photographed with the camera turned on its side, so the pale deck and its fan of white cables run vertically against banked cloud, with one small figure walking on it. — Bridge, on its side

A small forest lake ringed with spruce and birch: people gathered on a sandy beach beside a thatched shelter, and two pedal boats moored in the reeds. — The swimming lake

A black loudspeaker cabinet with a large gold-coned driver standing on top of a grey studio monitor, in a room lined with more speakers and equipment racks. — Monitors

Two long-haired white shepherd dogs sitting side by side on sunlit grass, both looking straight at the camera. — Two white shepherds

Off the easel

Making it, and looking at it

Two paint-covered hands pressing and smearing blue, yellow, orange and white paint directly onto a sheet of paper, with a loaded palette on the table alongside. — In progress

Sometimes the brush is the problem

Tamryn standing in a gallery with teal walls, photographing a framed cubist Picasso painting on her phone. — Doing my homework

In front of a Picasso

Endorphins

Rock, trails, and dogs who insist

Climbing has been the perfect balance of exercise, outdoors, friends, and building resilience. Other than that, I enjoy hiking, walking my dogs, running, and yoga.

Abseiling down an orange-streaked sandstone face in a helmet and harness, with a long white beach and the sea far below, and another climber's helmet in the foreground.

Lead climbing a steep block of lichen-green sandstone under a clear blue sky, the rope running back down the face below.

High on a large brown rock face seen from the ground, with two ropes running the whole height of the pitch.

Crouched on a floodlit sports field at dusk with both arms around a large grey merle dog, who is leaning into the camera.

Back to the day job

The engineering is over here.

High performance computing, signal processing, and three internships’ worth of software.

See my skills