Born: 1962, Nelson, New Zealand Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. After working in Australia and the USA he returned to New Zealand graduating from University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1990 and obtaining a Master of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1997. He was winner of the 2001 Goldwater Art Award and a finalist in the 2002 Wallace Trust Art awards. His early work had strong links with some of the cryptic graffiti by American artists of the 1980s such as Basquiat and Keith Haring. The mixture of realism and abstraction along with references to other artists has been a feature of his work in which abstract line and shape is played off against each other. In the 1990s his interlocking and overlapping island paintings were references to the geographic nature of islands, the isolation of New Zealand as well as the shaped painting of the American artist Frank Stella. His recent works are constructed of small coloured elements lines, rectangles, shelves and ladders. This technique allows him to construct a range of figurative works out of the abstract lines and shapes and draws attention to the essentially abstract processes of painting itself by which daubs of paint are applied in such a way as to contract a recognizable image.