In his own words:
This exhibition is the first time I have shown works, except online where I have a blog and a Flickr page, for over 20 years. It also represents a kind of full circle for me as the very first time I ever showed my work was in my tiny bedsit in Little Russell Street, just around the corner from the Atlantis Bookshop. My next-door neighbour, a nurse named Betty, helped and gave over her room for the day, so we had more space, I got in a couple of cases of wine and invited everybody I knew to come and see. I sold my drawings at £1 a go, except for one that went for a whole fiver, (sold to Caitlin and John Matthews) and made enough to cover the costs and have a bit left over.
I left my job at the British Library and went to art school for 4 years in 1979 and then found myself back in the world of work in the age of Thatcher. With the help of friends, and a bit of good luck, I continued painting, exhibited a bit, and even made a little (very little!) money, until the spring of 1992 when I developed a kind of block over painting. I don’t think I have more than my share of neuroses, but this manifested as an extreme anxiety every time I entered my studio space that saw my paintings turn into a grey, formless slime. I stopped painting and allowed my drawing to outpace this anxiety by developing a kind of rapid automatism through making a mess, destroying it, then interpreting the results. I continued making these drawings for about ten years, at which point my photography became my main form of visual expression, and this continued until I retired in 2020.
Having left London for Wiltshire at the height of the Covid pandemic, I almost immediately started painting again. The problem seemed to be that, while I had been active for many years as a surrealist, I could not use any of the subjects or methods I had used since 1992, in effect I had to start from scratch, painting landscapes, which at any rate was a new subject for me.
I began to find my way as I developed my Groundscapes, typically close-up views of whatever was at my feet, increasingly transformed into biomorphic shapes that nevertheless retained a kind of realism. At the same time I found myself making a series of Memory paintings, which were either based on specific memories of places, or old drawings for works that I had never realised. The latter became a way of recovering some kind of lost energy and links with my own past.
Another series, Playground, originated in seeing empty playgrounds during COVID, finding an equation with the derelict landscapes of warzones, including the current horror of Gaza and the drawing of Toyen and the early ‘metaphysical’ townscapes of De Chirico.
The Bone in the Stream is a sort of meditation on the curious folk rite of ‘The Waters of the Moon’ or Toad-bone Rite.
The current exhibition shows a number of smaller works from these series along with some works from life. I have always enjoyed drawing and painting from life and find it both rewarding in itself and a way of feeding into what André Breton called “the inner model”, it adds strength and materiality to the dream. In the end, it would seem to be the variable tension between the observed, the imagined and the dreamed, combined with techniques that vary between the meticulously drawn and chance, dripped paint and random scribbles, in order to find something that goes beyond such dichotomies, that interests me most.