ABOUT ME

I never set out to be an artist

From being a small child, I’ve always made things – Meccano, Bayko, balsa wood planes, Airfix models, model railways, kites, miniature figures, the list goes on. The idea of being an artist never entered my head, though. I wanted to be an engineer. Then, a long stay in hospital, when I was 17, led me to repeating a school year, and I soon realised engineering wasn’t really for me.

Without much direction, I cast around, looking at all sorts of subjects, from Librarianship to Industrial Design. A chance encounter with a book about architecture and urban design, by Theo Crosby, brought me to planning. Despite A-levels in Chemistry, Physics, and Maths, I somehow managed to get a place at Birmingham College of Art, studying planning. My degree when it came was, for complicated reasons, a B.Sc. granted by the University of Aston. I then spent 30 odd (some very odd!) years of my working life as a planner in the West Midlands, London, Tyneside, Wiltshire and Ireland.

My involvement over that time in art as art was largely random. I had started taking photographs, with a borrowed camera, when I was about 18, and then more seriously when I was at University, but largely as a tool for course work. I became aware of Victor Pasmore via a visit to a housing development he designed in Peterlee, Co. Durham. Out of that grew, I think, my interest in mid-century art and artists. Paul Klee and Joan Miró came to my notice via the covers of Penguin science fiction books in the 1960s. I was especially drawn to Klee’s Moroccan paintings. I don’t recall how I discovered Kurt Schwitters, but via him came my interest in collage. 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, meeting artists like Andy Goldsworthy , Richard Long, Colin Rose and Edwin Easydorchik. I also assisted on a course for teachers on Art and the Built Environment. I helped organise a conference on the same topic, years later, in Wiltshire. By then, something was gelling, 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 that.

In about 2005. I began scanning some of my old transparencies, only to discover that many had succumbed to fungal growth and peeling emulsion. 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.

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 from that workshop began organising our own shows and selling events. That was, I think, when I first started seeing myself as an artist.

Influences

I engage with the work of others in different ways. With some it is visceral, others more analytic. That isn’t fixed. My relationship to Rothko’s work, for example, changed dramatically after I got to see it in the flesh. Seeing them in reproduction caused me mainly to think about how he made them. Seeing them as he intended, close enough to fall into them, changed all that. They absorbed me. I had a similar experience seeing Van Gogh’s painting ‘Gauguin’s Chair’ in Amsterdam. It seemed to pulse with energy.

Beyond that, I don’t think I could point to a specific artist as an influence. I look at a lot of art books – and obviously the real thing too when I get the chance.

In a talk at the Tate in 1980, the artist John Hoyland cited a wonderfully eclectic list of influences:

“shields, masks, tools, Avebury Circle, swimming underwater, views from planes, volcanoes, mountains, waterfalls, graffiti, the cosmos inside the human body, food, drink, music, dancing, relenting rhythm, the Caribbean, the tropical light, the northern light, the oceanic light. Borges the metaphysical, dawn, sunsets, fish eyes, flowers, seas, atolls. The Book of Imaginary Beings, the Dictionary of Angels, heraldry, Rio de Janeiro, Montego Bay”.

John Hoyland 1980

One of the things that struck me is that there are no artists.

Buried in a notebook somewhere, is a similar list I made, of just ‘Things I Like’. From memory, it included:

“stone circles, standing stones, hill figures, neolithic carvings, NASA/Hubble photographs, collections of similar objects, cave paintings, Nazca lines, shadows, Native American art, city plans, layers, mid-century graphics, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Science Fiction, Martian landscapes, Misssissippi maps, valley sections, Northern landscapes, low winter light, the sound of children in the nearby nursery, the wind blowing through long grass, timshel.”

Current work

My current work is abstract, but not without meaning. Landscape is ever-present. I never begin with that intention, but it appears anyway. A horizon materialises where two colours meet, a chance shape becomes a landscape feature. What continues to draw me in is the way a surface can become a world without ever being planned as one, a place that feels both distant and familiar. These places feel remembered, but its the kind of memory that resists recall, like searching for a word that’s ‘on the tip of your tongue’.

I work intuitively, starting with a limited palette, letting colour relationships guide the first decisions. As the layers build, the surface shifts, sometimes gradually, sometimes in abrupt turns. Solid shapes and deliberate marks sit alongside textures that can only happen through chance combinations. Ghosts of earlier layers, the slips that become ridges, the marks that only reveal themselves when the print is lifted, every hesitation and every accident, all play a part. I work with these traces letting them find their own way, until, eventually the image reaches a point where it says ‘stop’.

Where I’m going

There is a particular kind of artistic engagement with landscape that comes from moving through it. With dodgy knees and a bad back that is no longer available to me except superficially. I can see it, but I’m rarely in it.

I therefore need to find other ways of maintaining a relationship. Old photographs provide a visual record of places, but fixed in time. Google Earth and Google Street view allow me to explore places remotely and, importantly, to look at landscape in the round, even if vicariously. Most important though is memory, which recalls the experience of being in a place, the sounds and smells of it. things that can never be captured in photographs.

All my working life I have carried a notebook. I still have most of them going back to the 1970s. Buried in them are fragments of observation and thought which would otherwise have been lost, triggering memories, refreshing the experience of being there. I revisit them often and I’m starting to pull out material that might serve as inspiration.

I’m not trying to reproduce a landscape I can’t visit. I’m not interested in showing what a landscape looks like. My interests are the qualities, structures and human memories associated with it. I don’t want to move away from abstraction but I do want to strengthen that engagement with landscape. I don’t know how I’m going to do that yet.

Paradoxically, I’m thinking of starting by stepping back, looking at the way landscapes – and towns for that matter – are created. I haven’t been able to track down a link, but Christopher Alexander once described the landscape of southern England as one of the greatest human works of art. It was not designed, it emerged as the product of thousands of decisions by thousands of people over time. I see my intuitive way of working as something similar, enabling images to emerge without conscious planning, which have depth and authenticity.