I was born in 1979 in London to artist parents - James and Pamela Staines, both highly accomplished and inspirational sculptors - who gave me a unique artistic education as well as the gift of ongoing belief and encouragement to pursue a livelihood as an artist because it is who I am, no matter how precarious that might be. 

I received a 1st Class Honours degree in Book Arts & Crafts at the London College of Printing and have made my life and living as an artist ever since. There is a determination in me that holds a strong allegiance to a kind of vagabond-vision that has felt part of my story from before I can remember. It is committed to the unflinching authenticity and beauty in the misfit and the strange.

Over the years I have painted and painted and pursued this deeply-rooted desire to create worlds. Somehow I want to make stories come alive: to combine imagery and music and conjure that feeling of being Inside the Elsewhere. This pursuit has brought me through animation, puppetry, book making, theatre and music among many other disciplines. 

I have several times in my life lived on wheels in hand-built trucks, and this desire for the wayside life does not leave me. Most recently I was co-founder of Hedgespoken, a travelling storytelling theatre-cum-home built on a vintage truck, as well as its publishing branch Hedgespoken Press which published books of myth and poetry and folktale as well as my own art prints from 2016-2023.

This dream was there early on - that of the vagabond magician, the alchemical edge-walker, the travelling storyteller, the ragged upholder of beauty, the Seer of the Inbetween. I was always a dreamer as a child, and did not have both feet firmly in this world. But my commitment to the dream is stubborn and passionate, not just ephemeral. I was determined to make it tangible, to get earth under its fingernails, because otherwise people would not believe in it. I knew from a young age that I would be an artist no matter what it took, and I have spent all the years since then doing that.

My work has always been peopled by these melancholy, intense and odd-looking folk, who have somehow always been present in the peripheries of my imagination. 

I am sometimes asked why my work is so sad by those who seem to find it uncomfortable or baffling. For me the feeling in the faces I paint is not simply sad, but portrays a kind of yearning and lament all at once: pathos-and-duende-dancing, an ineffable sense of memory and grief and beauty and hope all bound up together in the eyes of another. We all recognise this beautiful melancholy feeling and it evokes different things in each of us. Many many people over the years upon encountering my work exclaim: “Oh! It’s like something I remember from some time before … like a dream, or childhood, or…” They find they cannot put the feeling into words but so many people’s reflections have shared this sense of strange familiarity now, that I have come to believe that I am indeed invoking something otherworldly yet commonly felt in my work.

The Otherworld is a place I feel I have frequented willingly through my art over my life so far, but more recently I have had to go there against my will when Epilepsy arrived in my life after the birth of my youngest son. Since then I have been wrestling with trying to understand its nature, and how that connects to the Otherworld that has always courted me in my dreams and artwork.

For me there is something vitally important about the deep power that imagery holds for humans, and I am fascinated by how iconography moves us, how art can be amuletic and possess spirit. There is a thread there that I continue to follow in my work: that of magic and alchemy, not as whimsical fancy but as a real and old device for effecting change in the worlds and inside us. 

Alongside imagery, music has been an ever-present and vital companion to me, somehow the colours evoked by the minor keys and differently-ordered rhythms of the musics of Eastern Europe and the Balkans that I love so deeply seem to echo the melancholic, ancient and life-giving umbres and ochres and deep reds of my palette. Playing the button accordion at firesides and on street corners, on stage and with friends has brought me great joy, as has learning the polyphonic songs of this part of the world. I use music a bit like others use mind-altering drugs: it takes me easily and passionately through the gates into the Otherworlds I want to paint.

I live in South Devon, near to Dartmoor and have a studio in nearby Totnes. My two sons are the beloveds of my life and growing wild and happy amid the green.

There are many creative projects in my cauldron and I am dreaming always of the next journeys, in this world and that.