JANUS PORTRAITS
Some moments in a life deserve more than a photograph.
There are times when you know — even as you're living through them — that something is changing permanently. A chapter closing. An identity shifting. Something survived, or finally claimed, or irrevocably left behind.
These are the moments I paint.
A Janus Portrait is not a conventional likeness. It begins with your face and your story, and it becomes something larger — a painting in which the symbolic language of your life is woven into the composition. Objects that carry meaning. Light that tells the truth. A world built around you that reflects not just who you are, but who you are becoming.
The result is allegorical, cinematic, deeply personal. It is a portrait that will still be surprising to you in twenty years — because it holds something true about this particular crossing.
THE CONSULTATION
Every Janus Portrait begins with a conversation.
I want to know about the transition you're marking. What you're leaving. What you're moving toward. What objects, places, images or qualities of light feel like you. What you want to remember about this moment, and what you want to release.
From that conversation, I develop a symbolic vocabulary for your painting — the visual language that will carry your story. Before I begin, I share a compositional proposal for your response. This is a genuine collaboration: your story and my eye, working together.
When the painting is complete, it arrives with a written document from me — a few hundred words explaining the iconographic choices I made and what I saw in you that found its way onto the canvas. The painting and the document together become a single artefact of this moment in your life.
THE TIERS
Passage - from £7,500
A single-figure portrait, oils on panel or canvas (approximately 60 × 80cm). One to two key symbolic elements, developed collaboratively. Two in-depth consultations by video or in person. Working from photographic reference. Completed within six to eight weeks.
For a person who wants their story told with precision and restraint - beautifully made, unmistakably theirs.
Crossing - from £10,000
A larger work (approximately 80 × 100cm), with a richer symbolic vocabulary: more fully realised setting, greater complexity of composition, deeper collaborative development of the allegorical elements. Multiple consultations, including at least one in-person sitting. Completed within ten to twelve weeks.
For a person who wants the full weight of their moment held - a painting with room to breathe, to accumulate meaning, to unfold.
The Full Janus - from £15,000
The complete work. A large-format painting (from 100 × 120cm) with a fully developed allegorical composition, gilding or mixed media where the work calls for it, and an extended collaborative process — multiple sittings, a thorough excavation of the symbolic language of your life, and the written iconographic document delivered alongside the finished painting.
This tier is for people who want the experience of being truly seen by a painting, and who understand that such a thing takes time, care, and genuine artistic ambition.
I take a very small number of these commissions each year.
THE TRANSITIONS I PAINT
People come to me at many kinds of crossroads. Among them:
The end of a marriage — and the beginning of yourself, singular and reclaimed. The completion of something long worked toward: a book, a degree, a decade of work. A significant birthday, particularly those that arrive with a reckoning. A diagnosis survived. A career left behind. A child grown and gone. An identity finally, fully claimed. The death of someone who defined you, and the question of who you are without them.
If you are standing at a threshold and you feel the pull of marking it with something made - something that will outlast the moment - I'd like to hear from you.
These commissions matter to me. I give each one my full attention. If this feels like the right thing at the right time, trust that instinct.