Biographical

I'm 55 now, going on 56. I trained as an engineer, not an artist.

I've doodled & sketched much of my life but I got into drawing & painting in a big way in 2001, after my wife died of cancer. Now it's a firm fixture in my life.

 

 

 

 

Why Paint?
Ask a dozen painters and you'll probably get a dozen different answers.
For me it's showing what I see and what I find important in that scene - what is it that makes that view what it is. And in the process you find out more about what you see and how you see it.

I don't paint abstracts but all figurative art is abstractive - pulling out and arranging the things that matter most. This is true whether it's a landscape, a portrait or a sketch: what do I see? What makes me understand what I'm looking at and what shape it is? What's significant to me?

From this comes communication: if the picture contains those things which are important to me in conveying what I saw, then someone else looking at the picture sees at least in part what I saw and some of
what I thought about it.

If this works then the picture can stand on its own. Visual art should be just that, visual: I mistrust art that needs a long explanatory
justification in words. Using the title to start the viewer looking at the right aspects is one thing but to me the need for a separate
explanation is an admission of failure - if it needs explaining in words then the picture - or sculpture, or whatever - has failed to communicate.

Portraits

We read faces in immense detail without ever thinking about it. we're attuned to expressions. This inbuilt sensitivity which we all possess makes portraiture both fascinating and difficult. Fascinating because you have to look, really look, at many details at once, instead of gathering the general impression we use in ordinary life; difficult because you have to represent all those details together in a believable whole which captures that particular person. And all the time our pre-programmed responses to other peoples' faces get in the way of really seeing what's there.

The tiniest things can change a portrait - a tiny flick of light at the corner of the mouth, a shadow on the forehead. Even Sergeant, a
wonderful portraitist, said that a portrait is a painting of a person, in which there is something wrong with the mouth. Difficult- and fascinating.

 

Exhibitions

Society of Graphic Fine Art, 2004, Bristol

Art in the Dockyard, Chatham Historic Dockyard,
Kent, 2004 - 2nd prize

South East Open Studios 2005

Society of Graphic Fine Art, 2005, London

Wadhurst show 2005, Wadhurst, E Sussex

Chapel Artists' exhibition, Cranbrook, kent 2006

Society of Graphic Fine Art, 2006, London

Wadhurst show 2006, Wadhurst, E Sussex

South East Open Studios 2007


and rejected by...

Images 04, Mall Galleries, London

Images 05, Mall Galleries, London

Pastel Society 2007, Mall Galleries, London

BP Portrait Award, 2007, National Portrait Gallery

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2007

Etching - what is it?

Etching is a way of patterning a metal plate using acid, so that the surface of the plate will hold ink. The metal plate can then be put through a press to push a piece of paper onto the plate, transferring ink to paper and making the print. The technique started in the 15th century, and is probably derived from
ways of patterning armour.

These are not 'prints' in the sense of mass-produced copies. Even once you have made the plate, many different effects can be made depending on how much ink is put on, how it is wiped off, etc. The plate is only the skeleton - each hand-made print is different to the next, however slightly.

In its simple form, the process uses a clean metal plate coated in a thin layer of wax. The artist draws his design into the wax using a sharp point. When the metal plate is put into a bath of acid, the wax stops the acid working over the coated areas but where the artist has scraped the wax away, the acid marks the surface of the plate. When the wax has been cleaned off, these marks left by the acid will hold ink in the shape of the artists design.

Part of the appeal for me is that an etching always seems to produce the unexpected - you're never sure how it will look until you actually print it. I suppose this isnít all that surprising - you start the whole process by drawing things as a mirror image, and the marks which show up light when you draw
into the wax will be the areas which when printed will be dark. It can be a bit like drawing on a negative in a mirror.