I was born and raised in Rotherham and worked at Parkgate Iron and Steel straight from school. Eventually I left to study Graphic Design at Birmingham Art College and followed this by undertaking an Art Teaching Diploma at Liverpool University. I then spent the next forty years teaching Art in Merseyside and Sefton. It would be tempting as a Yorkshireman to call this my overseas missionary service, but in reality it was a real privilege to work with some amazing art teachers and wonderfully talented students.
Along the way I gained an M.Des at Liverpool University School of Architecture and began to take my own work a little more seriously.
My father was a steel worker from Scotland and an excellent artist who made pictures on any surface to hand and I believe that many of his drawings must still exist on the plaster beneath the wallpaper in our past Rotherham houses. Art and in particular drawing has always been in my life. My daughter, an art teacher, is studying for an MSc in Art Therapy while my grand daughter (age 6) has set up her easel alongside mine in my tiny studio.
For many, art is relaxing, healing, contemplative, an expression of self, or even life enhancing, all genuinely felt and believed, but for me it is always a struggle, a never ending effort to allow others to join me in what I am seeing.
The majority of my subject sources are marine and mainly drawn from the Yorkshire and North East Coasts. I spend many hours there, particularly in the places where people work or have built structures. Harbours, docks, jetties, piers, industry, boats and ships are visual magnets and I usually sit for hours just looking. Realism is fundamental to my approach, but I hope with a touch of melancholy. I am all too aware of how transient my subjects are and most should have long disappeared under the wheels of progress. Some have already passed. There is always a sadness about my work because I realise that when I paint I am capturing fleeting glimpses of a time that soon will be no longer.
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