Huxley

Born and educated in Manchester, Huxley has always been a painter and a sketcher at heart. Even while building a successful career in business—eventually serving as CEO in both the UK and the USA—there was always a painting room, always a canvas in progress. Holidays became moments of stillness and reflection, spent sketching across South Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America. These experiences of observation and travel quietly nurtured an enduring creative discipline that would later come to define his life’s focus.

Huxley’s early work was shaped by a fascination with the great masters he admired. He copied and studied the techniques of Monet, Degas, Peploe, Chagall, Kandinsky, and Mondrian—absorbing lessons in light, structure, and emotion. What began as an exploration of technique slowly evolved into an exploration of ideas. He discovered that one idea could spark a thousand more, and that curiosity drew him toward creating his own unique voice. Having long sketched portraits—first in pencil, then in biro—it felt natural for him to transition into painting portraits, and later, landscapes and cityscapes.

During the pandemic, Huxley made a decisive shift: a now-or-never commitment to painting full-time. His artistic style has since become an amalgam of the painters and movements that shaped him. He draws inspiration from Kandinsky’s abstract energy, Peploe’s colour and composition, Monet’s impressionist palette, Mondrian’s geometric rigor, and Modigliani’s emotional depth. Contemporary influences, such as Lynn Boggess’s tactile expressiveness, also inform his approach, prompting him to continually ask, how did they do that?

Much of Huxley’s portrait work delves into the subtleties of emotion and human ambiguity. He explores the spaces between expression and perception—moments when joy resembles sadness, or when contemplation might mask surprise. This fascination with the unknowable echoes Modigliani’s influence and defines much of Huxley’s current practice.

Now based in Cheshire, Huxley’s paintings combine post-impressionist and abstract sensibilities, rich with texture, movement, and atmosphere. Whether portraying a face, a skyline, or a fleeting light across water, his work seeks connection over comprehension—an invitation for curiosity rather than certainty. For Huxley, art is for everyone: not something to be decoded, but something to be felt.