Why Skiing Artwork Sits at the Heart of My Work
Skiing artwork wasn’t a conscious decision for me - it was simply where everything began. I came to the Alps with a sketchbook, a bar job, and the outlook of a happy chancer who thought things might somehow work out. I didn’t arrive with a plan to become an artist, let alone to build a career around skiing art. But the mountains have a way of stripping things back to what matters, and for me, that was drawing, painting, and trying to hold onto how it felt to be up there.
From the very beginning, skiing and art were inseparable. They weren’t separate subjects or ideas - they were just life.
How Skiing Artwork Started My Career
My first winters were spent in Serre Chevalier, working behind a bar. It didn’t take long to realise I could make more money drawing than pulling pints. I started sketching the local French ski instructors - panda eyes, tight ski suits, and over-exaggerated confidence - and before too long, the folk they taught all wanted a copy. That was the first moment I understood that art could pay its own way.
A few years later, I ended up in Chamonix. What struck me wasn’t just the scale of the mountains, but the lack of art that reflected what people were actually doing there. Photography shops were selling pristine images of Mont Blanc, but no paintings that captured skiing as an experience - the movement, the risk, the exposure.
The sensible thing would have been to assume there was a reason for that. Instead, I rented a wooden shed in the Grands Montets car park.
That shed became my first gallery, and it’s where my skiing artwork truly began.
I was paying €900 a month (terrifying at the time) so I built small display boxes outside, lit them up, filled them with ski paintings, and served hot wine in the hope that people would stop on their way back from skiing. And just enough of them did. Enough to survive that first season. Enough to prove that these paintings connected with people.
Painting Skiing as Experience, Not Postcards
From the start, I never wanted to paint snowy postcards. I painted what my friends and I were actually doing: backcountry days, the Vallée Blanche, standing on ridgelines with skis on our backs, moments where the air feels thin, and everything sharpens into focus.
A helicopter pilot used to call me when he had a spare seat, and I’d jump in. Whilst hovering in the air, I could capture the moment people walked the ridge to enter the Vallee Blanche from a unique viewpoint – one that was rarely photographed. When they saw those paintings later, it felt familiar. Like a fragment of their own day, not something staged.
That’s the core of my skiing artwork. I’m not interested in literal locations. A painting like Ski Baby isn’t a specific slope - it’s all the places I’ve skied, layered together. With portraits, I use photographs. With skiing, that approach doesn’t work. If you stick too closely to a photo, the moment you step outside it, it feels like a mistake.
When I paint skiing, I allow mistakes. Those mistakes are usually where the original, interesting parts appear.
But many mountain paintings are now commissioned using holiday photos to put you and your family back in the mountains on a canvas.
I Can Paint Literal Ski Scenes, But I Look for Something More
What I’m really trying to capture is the sensation of being there - the height, the cold, the exposure, the snow burning your nose. Up close, the figures in my skiing artwork are loose and sketchy. Step back, and they read as real.
Someone once described my work as “abstract on reality”, which I’ve always liked. It’s painted abstractly, but it still feels true.
There are already photographs of the mountains. My job is to remove anything unnecessary and leave only what matters - whilst dropping in a few Midnight brush strokes along the way.
A painting can do something a photograph can’t. It can hold an entire day at once. The frost of the morning, hard shadows at noon, the pink of late afternoon light - all living together in the same image. It doesn’t matter if those moments overlap. Skiing art isn’t about documentation; it’s about experience.
Chamonix, Scale, and Alpine Inspiration
Chamonix itself shaped my skiing artwork more than any single descent. The valley floor sits low, then suddenly the mountains rise straight up - no gentle build, just vertical drama. You feel incredibly small there, and that sense of scale feeds directly into the paintings.
It is a town full of history and charm, but the mountains are intimidating. One serious run can be enough for the day. But for those who love it, there’s an unspoken understanding - no one needs to brag about what they skied, because everyone in the bar probably did something similar or better.
After that first winter in the car park gallery, I moved into a bigger space in Argentière - an old building awaiting renovation. White walls, fixed lighting, and suddenly it was a gallery. But I didn’t want to sit around waiting for people to wander in. I turned it into a place people gathered: wine, cheese, donated beer from the MBC Chamonix Microbrewery, and friends dropping by. Half gallery, half hangout.
That sense of community still sits underneath the work.
Why Skiing Artwork Still Shapes My Art Today
Skiing artwork remains such a big part of my portfolio because it’s where I learned that art could stand on its own. It’s where I took my first real risk. And it’s where I figured out the kind of artist I wanted to be - not someone reproducing what already exists, but someone trying to hold onto how it felt to be there.
The ski paintings are about movement, scale, and being small in a vast landscape. Those ideas run through everything I do now, even when the subject changes.
My kids began skiing at two (probably too young), but I didn’t really have a choice. They simply love the snow more than my wife and I do. Which means I’ll have to keep painting until I drop just to pay for the family ski pass.
If a painting makes you want to ski - or reminds you of a day when you did - then the work has done its job.
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