Biography

About the Artist 

I was born in Birmingham in 1950, and educated at Lordswood Tech. It was in the final year at school that my real interest in painting took hold, when, with encouragement from the art master, Mr Hart (Yes really! )I tried oils for the first time. After school in 1967, family commitments meant work came first, so I absorbed as much knowledge as I could from books, basically teaching myself.

The need to see what others were doing saw me join Lew Thomas, night school classes in 1971, attending through to 1975, when with other like-minded individuals became a founder – member of the Saracen Art Group, exhibiting with the group into the late eighties.Between these years, I was awarded first prize in the Birmingham Spring Festival art competition 1978, co – founded “Artco” with Jim Taylor, and with him organised a year- long touring exhibition of our working the Midlands  in 1983. Various exhibitions followed, including my first one- man show at Allaways Gallery in 1989. Following redundancy in 1991, I took the new business allowance and turned professional in 1992, concentrating my efforts as an aviation artist. In this genre I exhibited with the Guild of Aviation Artists and had a one- man show at Tangmere Aviation Museum, two shows at 1st. Floor Gallery, Romsey Hants, Brookland Museum and had a painting accepted Into the RAF Club London. Had successive print runs with various publishers, and was interviewed on Central T V and radio W M. I also set up Fire bird Arts to publish my own work and contributed artwork images to magazine articles and book covers.

I decided to concentrate on landscapes and abstracts after twelve years of aviation art, feeling I needed to “real” painting again. Currently I have exhibited at Artyfacts Gallery in Bromsgrove.

About my Work  

The principle influence on my early work was Claude Monet. His phrase “Don’t paint the object, paint the light that hit’s it” was important to me, and this still holds good for me today.

Later in the mid- seventies, in an effort to improve my drawing skills, realists became important, among them, Andrew Wyeth, Alex Colville and Richard Estes. In aviation, Michael Turner and Frank Wootton are key. Now with abstracts , my inspiration is fired by Sam Francis, Ian Stephenson, Denis Bowen, Bryan Wynter and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

My current interest in abstracts has been fired by needing to seek new ground, and by seeing what the students were up to ay Bournville College. I have always had an interest in astronomy, and particularly cosmology, the “big picture”as it were. My paintings are a reaction to the current ideas in this field. I try to find visual forms to translate such theories as Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the very stuff that powers the universe. The idea that particles on the sub- atomic level; minute, invisible, can be responsible for everything in the vast void, that our very selves are re- cycled star- matter, are so exiting, I try, in my work, to show this micro- macro co – existence as a kind of random formlessness of dots and squiggly lines which appear to be succumbing to the invisible dynamics of immense forces.