Jimmy is a contemporary artist, painter, and sculptor from Cape Town, South Africa. He is specialised in portraiture, figurative work, nudes, and sculpting.

As a child, he was always drawing. Throughout his teenage years and into adulthood, he continued to draw, illustrate, and make things. After completing his schooling, he studied graphic design. It wasn’t until he was 35 that he started focusing more on painting in his spare time.

Initially, he started with acrylic paint because he was impatient and couldn’t wait for oil paint to dry. But eventually, a friend and fellow artist introduced him to oil paint and methods started evolving. After a while, he managed to create some pieces that he felt confident about. He fells in love with oil paint and began painting a variety of subjects.

However, he struggled to break free from the restrictive, precise, and controlled design style that was embedded in him through his graphic design and illustration background. He realised that his favourite brushes were all rather small brushes used to create detailed, clean, and precise strokes. So he pushed them all aside, grabbed all the large brushes he had, and forced himself to paint using only large brushes. It was such a frustrating process, but through experimenting, he discovered the answer he was looking for.

One of his greatest inspirations is the human face. He has long been fascinated by people’s faces, which he feels expresses their identity. He started painting his favourite movie characters and celebrities in this newly discovered style, using only grayscale at first. This was the start of his career as a professional artist.

Over the years, He continued to push and challenge himself as an artist. He started working with full colour, doing larger pieces that would connect with the viewer differently, and doing artistic nudes. He experimented with other materials and different tools to create new techniques.

Eventually, he found a new tool that could deliver strokes resembling those of a palette knife. It was then that his unique style emerged and has carried through into his artworks going forward. This resulted in his signature style that incorporates expressive, realistic, abstract, and design elements in his work.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown of 2020, Jimmy started producing his first astronaut pieces. These were produced in a far more realistic style, and most were quite conceptual, combining the astronaut with elements of nature like animals. He suspect that isolation and the vulnerable state that the world found itself in influenced the creation of these works on a subconscious level.

In 2022, he started sculpting and produced his first bronze sculpture based on one of his astronaut paintings. Working in three dimensions is challenging but also exciting, providing him with a totally different perspective from the two-dimensional paintings he produces.   

As a contemporary artist, Jimmy continue to push and challenge himself, experimenting with new techniques and materials to progress his art.