Hi Rob, I'm pleased you like the caricatures, I had a lot of fun with them, and they are something which comes fairly naturally. But to answer your question, I'm an illustrator who is trying to learn to paint and I'm not happy with the results yet.
The paintings are as good as I can make them at the moment, but my ambition always runs far ahead of my abilities. I suppose that's the case for most of us, it's a good thing of course but it can be depressing if you let it.
I'm the same, and hope many others are. It's the ambition running ahead of ability that keeps me creating, in the hope that one day ability will catch up. That's my goal in life; to produce an artwork that I'm 100% happy with.