I never set out to be an artist
I started taking photographs when I was about 18, and more seriously when I was at University. The idea of being an artist never entered my head, however. I wanted to be an engineer. However, a long stay in hospital when I was 17 led to me repeating a school year. I soon realised it wasn’t really for me. Without much direction, I cast around, looking at all sorts of subjects, from Cybernetics at Loughborough University to Industrial Design at Hornsey College of Art, North London.
A chance encounter with a book about architecture and urban design, by Theo Crosby, brought me to planning. My A-levels were still Chemistry, Physics and Maths though, and I had largely lost interest, so my final grades were poor. Somehow I managed to get a place at Birmingham College of Art, studying planning, but had no contact with the rest of the College. My degree when it came was, for complicated reasons, a B.Sc. granted by the University of Aston.
Discoveries
My involvement in art as art was random. I became aware of Victor Pasmore via a visit to a housing development he designed in Peterlee, Co. Durham, where in 1955 he had appointed Consulting Director of Architectural Design for the development corporation. Paul Klee and Joan Miró came to my notice via the covers of Penguin science fiction books in the 1960s. I don’t recall how I discovered Kurt Schwitters. Many years later, I discovered that Schwitters’ sponsor to come to the UK as a refugee, was also my family doctor when I was very young! In the early 1970s I was a constant visitor to the V&A, exploring the galleries from sculpture to musical instruments.
In the 1980s, I worked with Northern Arts on the early days of Gateshead’s public art programme. That’s when I became aware of the work of land artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. I also assisted on a course for teachers on Art and the Built Environment. Later, in Wiltshire, I helped organise a conference on the same topic. My focus, if I had one, was I think on creativity in general, not in any particular art form. Something was gelling, though, because in the late 80s, I enrolled on an ‘A’ level in Art. I had no intention of taking the exam, I just wanted to ‘do it’, but my move to Wiltshire ended it anyway.
From digital to ‘inky fingers’
Around the time I turned 50, I started scanning in some of my old transparencies, only to discover that many had succumbed to fungal growth and peeling emulsion. Trying to restore them involved, in some cases, the recreation of large parts of the image. At some point, I realised that the work I was doing as restoration could be done in its own right and began making and selling what I called, at different times, digital paintings and digital prints. I also took various short art courses and started going to art exhibitions more regularly.
In about 2008, another chance opportunity led to a tour of 107 Print Studios, in Wiltshire, where I saw work in progress by Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin. I was hooked, and within a week had enrolled on a print workshop at Wiltshire College in Trowbridge. Later, a group of us on that workshop began organising our own shows and selling events until the Pandemic, which also closed the workshop. That was,, I think, when I first started seeing myself as an artist.
If I have a ‘philosophy’, it is simply a belief that certain arrangements of colour and shape are intrinsically harmonious. I like abstract art so that is what I focus on, although landscape is never far away. I work intuitively, putting down colour on the plate, taking an impression and reacting to what I see, repeating until the picture says stop. There are several posts about my process on the blog. The link is to just one.
Digital again
During a period when further health issues stopped me working in the studio, I went back to working digitally. Originally I had used photographs as source material, but this time around I used colour separations generated from the scanned images of my monotypes. The digital process allowed me to create variations on the monotypes without destroying their uniqueness by printing straight reproductions.
I had been considering making screen prints, but in my brief foray in the past I found it very fatiguing. So, when around this time I came across a reference to Risograph printing, it seemed the way forward. This was confirmed when I saw work in Pressing Matters magazine. I did a workshop with 16Tonne Press near Bristol and following that produced a trial edition of four small prints, which worked out well. I’m now planning the next and much larger print.
Insert Risograph scans here
There is more I can do with gel printing, I’m sure, and I am developing some other ideas around assemblage and artist books, which may give me a vehicle for incorporating another love of mine, the artwork found in vintage SF magazine of the 40s and 50s.
