About FORBES

It is rare that a person has the opportunity to learn two professions in one lifetime and I am excited to reach a significant stage on my second apprenticeship, although I have a feeling that this "apprenticeship" will never end as there is so much to learn in Art. 

Consequently I reckoned that I could do worse than gather the fundamentals discovered and developed by the Old Masters and other artists over 500 years, and have based my technical studies on the French Academic method, beginning with detailed graphite drawings, followed by charcoal cast drawings, life studies and finally oil cast and still life paintings. 

My studies have simultaneously included the contemporary at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and the traditional at the Academy of Realist Art (ARA) in Edinburgh and Toronto. My long term objective is to bring traditional skills to a contemporary situation in the context of nature.

Current work
I am interested in the use mankind has made of natural objects and how nature sets about reclaiming them after man’s misuse or abandonment.  

Robert Frost’s poem The Road not Taken concludes: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I – 
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

These lines have inspired my train of thought and encouraged me to pursue the parallel programme with ARA. I think the words are appropriate since my approach is somewhat different from my colleagues, however, it does not mean that I have ignored the contemporary merely that I have actually " kept the first for another day!"