About Me
I remember the old saying, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, but not any more, now an artist needs a thousand words to explain why he painted a picture. So in this and succeeding blogs I’ll be talking about some of my paintings.
I was born in 1956 and I began painting in oils when I was twelve years old. When I was seventeen I attended a two-year Foundation Course and I have a Ba Honours degree in Fine Art. I also have a City and Guilds Teaching Certificate and I have taught in schools as well as giving private tuition. I teach basic drawing skills, especially from life, and painting and drawing technique as these are things that can be taught. What can't be taught is the spiritual aspect of painting, the feeling or intuition an artist needs to have, this must come from within.
My best works are the pictures that I have painted for myself, without deadlines I'm free to undertake extensive reworking if I decide to change the composition. A good example of such a picture is 'Memento Mori'. This painting has been through numerous changes and an in depth discussion of the work will be featured in a future blog.
My work is figurative sometimes I paint from life and sometimes I use photographic references. Regarding the use of photographs thanks to home printing it is much easier to produce the source material I need for my pictures. I cannot conjure a complex realistic scene purely from my imagination so I study various images and adapt them to my purpose.
As to where I stand in terms of contemporary art I’ve realised that I have more in common with Outsider Art than with any other trend. When I consider that I’m largely self-taught, most of my work is obsessively detailed and I have always operated outside of the mainstream. However my work has proved popular among a small group of business people and private collectors.
When I was going through some of the many paintings still in my possession I found an early self portrait painted in February in 1977. Also I discovered an image of one of my psychedelic pictures, between 1977 and 1980 I painted many such pictures but I now have only a few snapshots of most of this work.
But why paint? Being an artist is not a career path for most people. And the UK is not really an artist friendly environment. I’ve been painting or drawing pictures since I was about 7 or 8 years old. Why? The reason I paint is because I have to have some way of escaping reality and entering into the world of my own imagination. In a way it helps me to justify my existence as a human being and most importantly the pictures I create are unique, only I could have made them. Whether or not the world needs my art is another question that is still waiting to be answered.
