After completing his degree, and a short period of postgraduate study at Lancaster University, Head began showing at the Colin Jellicoe Gallery in Manchester and with the flamboyant art dealer Nicholas Treadwell.
Head then moved on to producing urban realist paintings, closer in theme and style to the work he had made as an art student in Aberystwyth.
[2] In 2005 Head was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a painting of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Despite still suffering from this condition, Head continued painting and the scale of his work became larger, but with an increasing focus on London as long-distance travel became difficult for him.
[4][5] In September 2012 Paraskos arranged for a display of Head's work alongside that of Nicolas Poussin at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, and in September 2014 Head exhibited at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich as part of the exhibition Reality: Modern and Contemporary British Painting curated by Chris Stevens.
In part this is a consequence of an increasing interest in recent years in the work of modernist painters such as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque,[7] but it also stems from a natural evolution of his basic painting process.
Even when producing ostensibly realist paintings Head always maintained that his work was not concerned with the visual appearance of the world, but with the full sensual experience of being in a particular place over a period of time.
In recent work this has led to overtly composite or layered images, in which time and movement play a more significant role than the creation of something that can be mistaken for a photographic snap shot.
[9] Head's starting point for any painting is to stand in a specific location, such as the entrance to a London Underground station or a coffee shop, where he will gather information by sketching, photographing or simply experiencing the scene.
The end point, however, is never to recreate an image of that location, but to use that information and experience to invent an artificial world that convinces the viewer of its own independent reality.
In this Head's previous work as a neo-classical painter is significant as his spatial constructions are derived from classical ideas of perspective rather than being imported from a camera, computer or other machine.
[15] In terms of subject matter, Head tends towards urban scenes, particularly London, although he has also painted New York, Moscow, Los Angeles, Prague, Rome and Paris, amongst other places.