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 and also given private tuition. I teach basic drawing skills, especially from life, and painting and drawing technique as these are things that can be taught.

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 a question that is still waiting to be answered.