I was born in 1991 in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. I live and work in Poole, Dorset. An ordinary week holds client work, painting, planning the next gathering, building things with my hands, the sea, and a dog who is convinced all of it is for him.

At nineteen I was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst into the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. At twenty-two I was the youngest Captain serving in the British Army. Then I did the thing officers almost never do: I took the rank off. I joined 21 SAS — the Artists Rifles — as a trooper, and earned my way to corporal in a regiment where nothing is given and everything is selected. The years that followed stayed inside the UK Special Forces community, including work alongside the Special Boat Service, and ended in a diplomatic posting in Colombia.

Much of that decade isn't for a website. Service taught me that discretion is a form of respect. What it left me with is simple: presence is practical. Notice what is changing. Govern your own reactions. Act when required.

People ask how a soldier becomes a painter. It never felt like a change of career — it was a change of direction: from the study of destruction to the practice of creation. The Artists Rifles were raised in 1859 by painters, sculptors and poets — soldiers who were artists first. I didn't choose that lineage as a brand; I served in it. Before the Army I trained in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth, and I began a degree I chose to leave in the first year, because the making mattered more than the certificate.

The studio practice lives exactly where those two lives meet. The work explores camouflage and concealment, identity and presence — what is hidden, what is revealed, and who is doing the looking. A developing body of work is called Hiding in Plain Sight.

Somewhere between those two lives sits a tipi in a field in Dorset, and the discovery that gathering people — around fire, food, cold water and honest conversation — might be the most useful thing I do. That became men's circles, a swimming community, festival builds, and eventually HEARTH: a substance-free creative culture whose whole method is Gather, Create, Tend, Renew.

Today the same philosophy runs through everything: Brannock & Co., where presence meets consequence; the Studio; HEARTH; corporate work in cyber-security consultancy at national scale; and conversations — talks, walks and firesides — with anyone serious about living deliberately.

I am not any one of these things. Not just a soldier, an artist, a businessman. The dimensions are different rooms of the same house, and the house is built on one foundation — which is the point of everything here.

These are the values on my coat of arms. Courage: move towards responsibility and truth. Integrity: let what you say and what you do be the same thing. Joy: because without it, discipline curdles into severity.

I don't claim to live them perfectly. My most reliable failure is generating more ideas than I can sensibly deliver — and I ride a fifty-pound second-hand bicycle whose bell exists to remind me not to take myself too seriously.

The work of my life is simple to say and hard to do: build myself honestly — in truth and alignment — and use whatever I learn to help others build themselves. Their presence. Their values. Their own fires.