| Born an increasingly long time ago in Guildford. Brought
up in Wokingham, Berkshire. Studied art at Berkshire College of Art
and then Falmouth School of Art, where I moved away from painting and
spent most of my time writing and doing photography. I worked for a
year in the college library as assistant librarian whilst writing a
novel which has quite rightly never been published ! Then did a year
at the University of East Anglia where I was awarded an M.A. in Creative
Writing. In 1975 went to live in San Francisco, where I married Marcia
and started painting again. Returned to England in summer 1976 and got
a teaching diploma at Leicester Poly in a serious effort to become employable.
We moved to Market Harborough, where I taught Art for five years and
painted sporadically. I exhibited locally in Stamford, Welham and Market
Harborough and did various private commissions. After five years I knew
that teaching was not going to be the career for me, and we spent the
next five years looking for a business Marcia and I could run together,
while I did a lot of supply teaching and we had two children. After
a spell working in Sculpture Conservation, we moved to Devon in 1987,
and for seventeen years ran a holiday business while the children grew
up and it quickly dawned on me that I wasn't going to get much painting
done in the winters, which was what we had originally if naively envisaged
when we bought the business. I pretty much forgot about painting, hardly
did any. If I wanted to get away from the business, I went fishing !
We sold the business in the autumn of 2004, after deciding that we both
had other stuff we wanted the opportunity to do before we got any older
! I took the plunge and started painting again, pretty much full-time.
It was, and is, a steep learning curve, and it doesn't seem to be getting
any easier. Each blank canvas scarey and exhilarating in about equal
measure. I paint subjects that excite me visually, in places I like
to be, and they nearly always contain an element of water. It is important
to me that the images are rooted in time and place. I use a camera,
much quicker than a sketch-book, and photographs give me the precision
and information that I want.I don't like drawing, I can only concur
with a comment Goya made, when mocking the academicians and their reliance
on drawing, 'Always lines, never forms ! But where do they find these
lines in nature ?' I don't find the linear abstractions of drawing any
help in painting, so I just stick to painting. |
