A born visual communicator and Image maker, Jay began his life and work in Scotland and England.
His early artistic talent, love of image, drawing and the mark was further nurtured in a creative boarding school in Devon, UK before emigrating to Australia as a teenager, an environment where his talent thrived and his unique visual language began to emerge.
Jay studied Design, Image Making and Visual Communications at the University of Technology Sydney and worked as a celebrated designer and art director for many years before heeding the call to his true artistic purpose: an exciting and authentic new painter.
Through unwavering focus and commitment to his artistic process, Jay has emerged as a strong, natural artist with a commanding ability to communicate and express ideas through painting, drawing and the ever-present line.
Jay is known for creating some of the iconic imagery in Australia's music industry. He has an aria nomination for designing The Cruel Sea's cd artwork as well as poster designs in Sydney's Powerhouse museum collection. He has presented solo shows at the Lismore Arts Centre including 'Unwild '(2012) and 'Bird of Paradise' (2011).
For the last few years (2014-16) Jay has worked in black and white and square format only, creating an exciting new body of work titled Got ID. A visual study into digital identity. He is also making an animated film based on these 44 works. Themes of Identity continue in his new work.
In 2016/17 Jay has been working on a number of new series of paintings as well as a large collection of works on paper.
Artists Statement
My work is driven by process. In this regard I am opportunistic, I recycle and make use of incidental elements and push a work towards revealing its true nature. The process begins in the abstract and, at a certain point, the narrative enters.
I work from my studio or on the lawn of my home in the Northern New South Wales countryside, allowing me complete freedom to move around a canvas. I like to work large as there is an unbridled physicality to my work that demands scale. Much like action painting, the canvases see-saw between order and chaos. This brings a fragile tension and energy to the work.
Mediums and materials will vary. My aim is to make marks that represent and delineate human responses to physical, emotional and subconscious worlds. Dense, shiny black indelible ink and quick drying acrylics give me freedom to layer and experiment. I use random objects found in my surroundings to make marks with character. They offer versatility, intensity and quality of line, which I am passionate about.
The process continues with layers of ink and paint, building detail and surface tension until a kind of iconography emerges. It becomes a visual language that evokes the momentum and complexity of our culture, and reflects the natural world and our place in it.