Why I Paint in Abstract - and What It Means to Me

People often ask me why I paint in abstract. It’s a fair question - and one I love answering, because the answer says everything about why I pick up a brush at all.

Abstract art isn’t about hiding from a subject. It’s about getting closer to the true essence of it.

When I walk along the shore at Talacre on the North Wales coast and look out across the water, what I feel isn’t a precise, photographic rendering of rocks and waves. It’s something harder to name - a distinct kind of coastal stillness, a vastness, a sense of being very small and very alive at the same time. That specific feeling is what I want to transfer onto canvas. And traditional realism, for all its beauty, can’t quite capture that emotion for me.

Abstract painting lets me work with colour palette, form, and texture as an emotional language in their own right. A sweep of warm ochre across a cool grey ground can hold the feeling of late afternoon sun on the Welsh hills better than any literal depiction could. A mark made quickly and instinctively on the canvas carries an organic energy that a rigid, carefully observed line simply cannot match.

This is what draws me back to my North Wales studio every day. Not to reproduce exactly what I see with my eyes, but to translate what I feel in my heart.

I think this emotional openness is exactly why large abstract wall art works so beautifully inside living spaces and modern interiors. Because it doesn’t dictate what you should think or feel - it warmly invites you into the frame and lets you bring your own story to it.

Collectors often tell me that an original painting or a framed canvas print means something completely different to them than it did to me when I was creating it in the studio. That’s not a failure of communication. In fact, that is the entire point.

A piece of contemporary abstract art grows alongside you. It beautifully shifts with the changing morning light, with your mood, and with the seasons. It is a feature on your wall that you never quite finish discovering.

Abstract painting is, for me, the most honest way I know to be an artist. It asks me to trust my creative instincts, to stay entirely present in the moment, and to let go of the need to be understood immediately. It is a daily practice just as much as it is a visual craft.

And when a collector tells me that one of my coastal paintings makes them feel a deep emotion they can’t quite put into words - well, that is exactly the place where I was hoping to meet them.