Another great Steampunk piece.

I feel like all my favourite things about painted canvases (those bright greens!) and Victorian engravings (cogs and tentacles, top hats and eyeballs) were combined in this piece.

I’m slightly surprised it hasn’t sold but also glad to still have it in my possession.

Filthy innuendo is something I’ve always enjoyed.

Here I have lovingly combined the fine 1950s bondage illustrations of Eric Stanton and speech bubbles from a 1970s British book for young ladies. Much hilarity ensued.

Of course it’s foolish adolescent Beavis and Butthead stuff, and I make no apology for that. I’ve always been drawn to – and guilty of – that kind of humour even as I’ve supposedly matured.

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

People would often ask me that and I didn’t know how to answer. “Dunno” seemed inadequate and saying that I just pluck them out of thin air seemed conceited, as if I could see something that non-artists couldn’t.

So here we have a collage showing a group of enthusiastic young artists harvesting fresh ideas from the aether. The implication is that only they can see the cornucopia of odd creatures writhing and romping around them (also a tribute to Bosch), it’s the world of their collective imagination.

The Dark Side of cuteness.

There’s nothing I love more than subverting cute images of kittens and princesses and cherub-faced little gnomes.

I’m drawn to the idea of ambiguous combinations of good and evil: a princess with evil on her mind, or a cartoon gnome with deadly laser eyes.

Perhaps the world is just a wonderful place filled with unspeakable horrors and also moments of transcendent beauty.

And often a self-destructive process.

This is a rarity for me – a collage with only a few elements.

Inspired by my friend Todd’s awful break-up, and drawing on my own experiences of being dumped as a teenager, I created this collage in the late 1990s.

I think it accurately captures how we often dissect broken relationships trying to work out what went wrong, and where blame lies, even when that process is itself a destructive thing.

An excited father-to-be contemplates the near – and distant – future.

As a young father-to-be I used to daydream about the things that were science fiction in my lifetime but might become science fact in my son’s lifetime: manned flight to Mars, moon bases and space stations, cell regeneration, teleportation…

The main part of this collage is a 2-page spread from a 1950s book imagining what men might find when they land on the moon. Turns out they’d find that canvas spacesuits weren’t warm or safe, and there definitely weren’t huge chunks of petrified wood littering the moon’s surface.

A triumph of  drippy canvas and Victorian engravings.

I did a whole series of collages with drippy paint in the early 2000s, spraying diluted paint onto white canvases and letting it slowly drip down them as it dried. The results varied depending on the mix of colours and how diluted they were.

This piece, maybe more than any other, captures what I was trying to do with that style -the colour illuminates the engravings and gives them a super punchy crispness. Having a lighter colour at the bottom emphasises that too.

It’s also the perfect mix of serious and ridiculous in terms of the characters. All the source material I use for my black and white collage looks very posed and formal and serious, making it such fun to undermine that with silly heads and fishy gentlemen in a turbulent sea.

Mmmm, chocolate….

One of my best early B&W works, notable for its relative simplicity. The main ‘character’ isn’t actually Salvador Dali but bears a close resemblance to him, and that fact heavily inspired the rest of this piece.

I had a lot of fun constructing the little steampunk machine, one of the first I created. It can be very time-consuming cutting out such tiny pieces but the result is always worth it.

The original of this is held in a private collection near Chicago but it makes a great print.

My art is all one big space party!

I’d been looking for an opportunity to use characters with planets for heads again, because I was so pleased with how “The Cosmic Joke” looked.

I came across a 2-page spread from a 1980s space book, which was big enough to fit my canvas with the seam covered by one of Bosch’s creations. Everything else kind of fell into place from there. As Hannibal from the A-Team used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

A double meaning, since I’m both a fan of Salvador Dali and also the father of a boy named Dali.

I don’t usually do self-portraits or makes cameos in my work but given the personal meaning behind this one I had to make an exception.

Under the watchful gaze of Creepy Uncle Salvador, I appear as an astronaut helping his son explore a strange new world of wonderment. And that’s a good a definition of the responsibility of fatherhood as any, don’t you think?

The little blue alien represents my son (I cite artistic license for the fact that there are three of them!) and has appeared in other fatherhood-themed collages such as ‘Space Tourists’.