Pencil Sketches

I didn’t always see eye to eye with my art teacher at school, but I will be forever grateful to
Norton Evans for giving me a sketchbook and telling me to draw in it every day. I was 16
and had just started at a new school in Bristol having moved there from Merseyside.
Sketching became a lifeline for me, a means by which I could forge an identity in an
unfamiliar environment. It was my way of communication with my classmates who would
be curious about what I was drawing, how a socially awkward kid could communicate with
the rest of the world. I quickly honed my style into a simple line drawing, inspired by the
work of David Hockney and Jean Cocteau. It was also the quickest way to capture an image.
These sketches are the bedrock of my practise, all the pictures I make usually start with a
line drawing and more often than not I am keen to keep the bold lines of the sketch.