The stories, symbolism and thoughts behind my art

My artwork has never been simply about creating something to look at.

Behind every painting and sculpture are months — sometimes years — of research, thought, symbolism, frustration, humour, anger and personal reflection. What you eventually see on the wall or standing before you is the finished work.

But it isn't the whole story.

For a long time, I allowed the artwork to do most of the talking.

I have realised that isn't enough.

There are details within my work that cannot possibly be understood from a single glance. A tiny object may carry an entire idea. A colour may connect one painting to another. Something beautiful may deliberately conceal something disturbing. Even the most grotesque imagery usually has a reason for being there.

These journals are where I reveal those reasons.

Here I take you beyond the finished artwork and into the thinking that created it — the symbolism, research, stories and experiences woven through my paintings and sculptures.

Some journals venture into mythology, morality and human behaviour. Others explore mental health, Welsh history and the stories behind my major sculptural works.

And increasingly, I am allowing them to venture somewhere I once found much harder to expose:

into me.

That is perhaps the greatest change in these journals.

I am no longer simply explaining what an object represents or why I painted something a particular colour. I am beginning to explain why I saw it that way in the first place.

I don't expect everyone to agree with what I see or how I interpret the world.

That isn't the point.

I want these journals to start conversations. To make you question my interpretation, form your own, and perhaps return to an artwork afterwards and discover something you hadn't noticed before.

Because these are not just paintings and sculptures.

They are stories.

And this is where I tell them.

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Explore My Journals

The Seven Deadly Sins

Explore Pride, Envy, Wrath, Greed, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth, alongside their darker interpretations of the Seven Heavenly Virtues.

• Pride

• Envy

• Lust

• Wrath

• Greed

• Gluttony

• Sloth

The Disorderly Demise of the Cerebral Cortex

Go inside my seven mental-health sculptures exploring Anxiety, Addiction, Bipolar Disorder, Dementia, Depression, Dissociative Identity Disorder and Schizophrenia.

Welsh Art & History

Explore Emrys — The Great Welsh Dragon and the history, people, industry, mythology and culture woven into my Welsh artworks.