Henry Moore made a good point: "It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of conceptions evolved in terms of logic and words." So, I will avoid "rounded-off logical exactness" in expressing my aims. My aims: To master application in every detail. To capture a purity of feeling, untainted and unlimited by logic and expectation. To balance high energy across the work with optimum indistinctness - optimum for observers 'in it for the long term'. The complex lines, forms, edges, colours and layers call on the observers' virtually infinite store of memories to bring their own resolutions to the indistinctness of the works. Some observers find the art too busy (and give up); some mistake it for random; and some observers start a long-term adventure connecting to the fragments within a piece, and to the links between the fragments. I encourage all observers to create their own art, be it painting, literature, dance, drama, music...

If you judge the works to be simple and superficial, then the connection they live for is denied. My art 'lives' somewhere between me and you, like T.S. Eliot said that poems 'exist somewhere between the writer and the reader.' Your instinctive judgement may miss the subtle clues; working out the pictures is a journey, perhaps never a fully understood 'destination'. The works are authentic, a unique view, complex (like you), painted or drawn in a new language - dense, emphatic, at times contradictory and chewy. The landscape I create is shamelessly obscure and challenging - challenging your dependence on comfortable conventional forms and symbols. The strongest pieces rage against a stagnant 'market-art', art the public expects. I'll close with Alfred Lord Tennyson's words, "I hate to be tied down to say this means that, because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation." I hate to be tied down, so my art is free - free to display the essence of my world boiled down.

Acknowledgements…

Thank you to my wife for all her support, and to a wonderful set of family and friends who follow with interest this artistic adventure. Thank you to the hundreds of staff with whom I have taught since my first year as a teacher in 1993. Their dedication and selflessness, encouragement and direction, patience and fortitude are mind-blowing. Thank you to the thousands of students I have taught over sixteen years of secondary school teaching. Their extraordinarily creative minds and positive outlooks are a constant inspiration.

"The French Sun 2004"

It all started in 2004, well, more like 1974…

2004 - a set of 36 oil pastels for a couple of pounds…and a sheet of white A4 paper…

1974 - picking up some tubes of oil paint from a small wooden box…fascinated by what these tubes could produce on a flat board…I was hooked at the age of five…