Having trained as a ‘Scientific Illustrator' one of my first jobs was to illustrate an Anusol brochure: to describe the situation in the most tasteful way possible. The Art Director resisted the suggestion the image should be in colour, fearing it would be a little too visceral (literally!). t was about this point I realised that the future might not be as varied and inventively interesting as I’d hoped and I started to work on a folio of work containing more exciting and ima

In the late 1980’s I moved to a small village on the edge of the Somerset Levels: two pubs and a Post Office…no streetlights, often isolated by floods in the winter. Coming from the safe, comfy suburbs I found the confrontation with The Seasons almost overwhelming: the melancholy of Autumn, the darkness of Winter and the outrageous verdant fecundity of Spring. In exploring the corners and byways of this new region I became aware of the character of the Greenman cropping up f

There was once a time (before Photoshop and long before AI) when to create a painting one actually needed a real brush, paint, surface….and artist…. So it was, in the late 80s, having decided I didn’t want to spend my life drawing birds and medical procedures, I found myself working as a ‘Pastiche Artist’: pictures of Oliver Cromwell holding a bar of soap (something to do with ‘warts and all’ I think), bottles of Martell cognac in a Manet-style vineyard and Artois adverts mim

Another image, taken from the archive of old notebooks, which I have recently drawn up and rendered. This one has the date 12.26 – so it’s been only fourteen years since I first jotted it down. I suppose you could classify this ‘genre’ as ‘English Surrealism’. Baffling to most – and unappealing to many – “Ah – Alice in Wonderland”: people often say at Art Fairs (with a rather troubled look on their face) as they grapple with the strangeness on show – so much at odds with

Taking a degree in Scientific Illustration (flies, fleas, trees and tumours) seemed a good idea at the time: at least, I thought, I would be taught to paint something. The courses on offer at so many Art Colleges in the late 1970s presented a woeful lack of direction – at least those which I saw. There was a lot of letting it hang out and not a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to do it. I knew that I would need to be employable from day one - so for four years I drew bodies (

Somehow, in my young mind, there formed a confusion and a muddling of the two words ‘Trespasses’ and ‘Trespassers’. The 1960s was a time when ramblers were asserting their ‘right to roam’ across the footpaths of England. There was considerable resistance from landowners and ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ signs were a common sight. Some ramblers doubtless took their rights too seriously or ineptly read maps and strayed from the straight & narrowly prescribed path… …anyway -

There has always been the naughty schoolboy side to my work. It often runs just below the surface, waiting to break out. When I was young, trips to the seaside were always brightened by the purchase of a Donald McGill naughty postcard or two. That sort of smutty humor was very much a thing of its day. A style of humor, reminiscent of Carry On films and Up Pompeii, which was totally non-PC. It offended almost every modern sensibility. However, it was once the bedrock of Englis

I grew up in Kent, not far from where Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) lived for a few idyllic, carefree years in Shoreham and where he drew his dreamlike early landscapes – ‘The Walk to Church’, ‘The Magic Apple Tree’. His playful, exuberant rendering of hills and trees as joyous, living things: defying conventions of structure and scale – that I found – and (still) find - liberating. We lived in the dull suburbs – in the creep of London’s hard-edged monochrome modernity – and yet

If we're returning home from the south Dales we often travel up Upper Wharfdale. Going past the pub at Cray we drive past the many...

DENT HEAD VIADUCT...from a sketch in my notebook