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Formal art training for me has always been sporadic and somewhat varied. Having been offered a place at art college I chose instead to do a degree in History and Education finding time for my art through subsidiary courses whilst a student. When I began to paint professionally I chose to attend classes with academician Fred Cuming in order to develop my own particular strengths relating to use of colour, draughtsmanship, and the ability to create atmosphere within a painting. These elements, central to my work, have remained constant.
During the 1970s and 1980s I developed successful relationships with two galleries in Kent which led to a range or commissions including producing series of paintings for Thomas Howell Kiewit in London, C.T.I in Dusseldorf, and for a firm of New York loss adjusters. Throughout this period too I exhibited frequently at several shows; and then by the 1990s I began to exhibit exclusively at The Linda Blackstone Gallery. With this gallery paintings have been shown successfully at several art fairs including those at Manchester, Dublin and Chelsea over the last year, and in September I will be exhibiting at an invitation only show at Cannes. Recently Washington Green approached me with a view to publishing some of my paintings.
More than anything else it seems it’s the tangle of human relationships that sets ideas going. Couples: talking, smiling together, being absorbed in themselves, kissing, enjoying their own company. Moods vary but generally ideas are optimistic, the future is bright, resolutions will be found. Narrative is often an intrinsic part of the picture, the paintings tell a story, a fragment of a scene leaving the viewer to continue the trace alone. And within these narratives women are frequently the most important.
Equally important and equally inspiring is the background against which the paintings evolve. Paris, with its distinctive cityscape of cafe and boulevard, provides a kind of close up setting where fragments of buildings, and the light within them, help create a particular atmosphere: a half lit brasserie, seen from rain-soaked streets, twilight times of darkening shadow and reflection. It’s a reflection of my long lived love affair with the city of artists.
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