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