About me

My Biography

My biography is not written. I could not be trusted to write it, and nobody else has expressed an interest. So here’s the short version.

I’m Sachan, a self-taught artist, born in Jersey in 1965. I went to Janvrin and St Helier Boys’ and left school at 15 with no art training. I have always painted, and I have always created an aesthetic around me. After my parents divorced, I spent every school holiday from the age of ten at my grandmother’s house in Croxley Green.

I trained as an apprentice hairdresser. For a while I told fortunes and sold things as a street market salesman. My father was a Christian Jew. After he left home I felt lost, so from about 18 I spent my summers selling to tourists in Jersey and my winters in India, sometimes six months at a time. I went to explore myself and other religions, to find out where I fit in the world, and to have fun in the sun.

In 1990 I started training as a nurse at Southampton University Hospital and worked in A&E, then came home to Jersey to work in rehabilitation, and later as a nurse manager. Alongside that, my first wife Debbie and I ran a health food business. Looking back, it was all the same job: reading people, and being with them at their most frightened, hurt and hopeful.

A car crash changed everything. I suffered a traumatic brain injury that ended my nursing career. Afterwards I went to Cuba as a student to learn Spanish. The crash had slightly damaged the language centre of my brain, and learning Spanish helped repair my English. When I closed the business during Covid, I finally found the time to develop a more formal practice. Everything I’ve lived through shapes the work: the longing, the fantasy, and the distance.

The name Sachan was given to me later by a meditation master. With Prem, it means something close to true love, or honest affection.

I don’t paint what things look like. I paint what they felt like. A piece usually starts as a photograph I saved without quite knowing why, until months later it pricks me and brings back a memory. Then I work the colour, structure and surface until the feeling comes through, even if it’s not the same feeling for you. I just want you to feel something.

Once I know which memory I’m chasing, I work the surface as much as the image. Slightly reflective, sometimes textured, it reacts to the light and to where you’re standing, so the painting shifts as you look at it. No photo on this site can show that. If you can, come and stand in front of one.

I build in layers that interact both physically and pictorially, so the painting stays alive while I work. I can keep responding to it and adjusting it until I finally leave it for a few weeks to dry.