People often ask me to describe my style in a sentence, and I still struggle to answer. Looking back over more than two decades of painting, I realise that's rather the point. My work has never sat still — it has shifted with my mood, my materials, and whatever subject happened to be pulling at my attention that year. This journal post is my attempt to trace that journey, from a cheap watercolour set in the early 2000s to the oils I work in today.
Where It All Began
I started out with nothing more than a basic watercolour set, teaching myself by copying landscapes from books and experimenting on whatever paper I could find. There was no formal training behind any of it — just curiosity, and a growing need to put down what I saw. Along the way, I began painting likenesses of people I met, using their character stories as a kind of visual diary of that period in my life.
From there I moved through many different mediums before eventually settling on oils, which remain my medium of choice today. There's something about the pigments in oil paint — the depth, the way colour sits and moves on the canvas — that I've never quite found anywhere else. The tones and hues you can achieve with oils suits the way I see the world, and it's stayed at the heart of my practice ever since.
Finding My Own Voice: Allotment Paintings
One of the most distinctive chapters in my development was a series of allotment paintings, which developed a style very much their own. I was drawn to Northern artists working in a similar vein — painters like Peter Stanaway and Geoffrey Key — as well as the East London Group, particularly Walter Steggles, whose quiet, observational depictions of everyday places struck a chord with me. Their influence helped shape how I approached ordinary, overlooked corners of daily life and gave me the confidence to see them as worthy subjects in their own right.
Teaching Myself, Believing in the Work
As a self-taught artist, I never had a mentor looking over my shoulder, no teacher offering feedback or encouragement. Everything I learned, I learned by doing — by painting the subjects that genuinely fascinated me and kept me coming back to the easel. There were plenty of people along the way who told me certain work would not be popular - but I carried on regardless. I had to trust my own instincts, because there was no one else's to lean on. Looking back, I think that self-reliance is what gave the work its honesty.
A Style That Refuses to Sit Still
Over the years I've moved between techniques depending entirely on how I feel on any given day — sometimes leaning towards semi-abstract, loose brushwork, and other times chasing something closer to photorealism, with very fine detail. I wouldn't say I have one single style. But I've come to understand that people recognise a Chris Cyprus painting when they see one, even across very different bodies of work. There are threads of consistency running underneath all that change — in colour, in mood, in the way I handle light — even if the surface style shifts from piece to piece.
Chasing the Light
It was through my Northern Lights paintings that I really became a student of light itself — how it falls, shifts, and transforms a scene. That study has become something I'm perhaps best known for. Alongside it sits my use of colour: a palette built around blues and greens, set against contrasting oranges and pinks, which I'd call my signature combination. Wherever the subject takes me, that relationship between light and colour tends to follow.
Moving Toward the Edge of the City
My most recent body of work, Edge of the City, marks a real departure from the landscapes, townscapes and tree paintings I've long been associated with. These pieces mix different mediums and viewpoints, looking across an urban horizon but from a country standpoint — an outsider's view of the city, painted from the edges looking in. It's a new direction, and one I've found genuinely exciting to explore. I am really excited to show these works in December at my exhibition at Salford Art Gallery.
Why I Keep Changing
I've come to enjoy questioning myself — asking why I'm painting what I'm painting, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, even when that's uncomfortable. I believe artists need to evolve, to keep changing subject matter and direction, or risk stagnating. Standing still has never really been an option for me, even when it might have been the easier path.
I'm looking forward to whatever comes next