As a boy growing up it was never actually in my mind to become an artist. Rather, it was something to which I was subconsciously drawn, stage by stage, as I moved through life, until at 30 years old I finally made the leap of faith to become a full-time artist, being able to totally make a living by selling my work.
From the earliest age I was excited by colour. Balloons, toy windmills, flags and coloured lights all enchanted me. I grew up on the edge of a Cornish town, Launceston, exploring the fields, woods and streams around home. My father ran a wholesale newsagents business and I travelled with him around the lanes of North Cornwall. I grew up with the sights, sounds and smells of this rustic existence in a world of small villages, lanes and farms and the big excitement of the sight of an occasional steam train on the branch line from Launceston to Padstow.
And then there were stories of giants, magic beans and beanstalks, Aladdin and his lamp, and the adventures of Sooty and Sweep with Sooty’s magic wand and ‘oofle dust’ read to me by my mother. Later I found fantasy in the boys comics to which I had ready access through my dad’s newsagent business. I liked drawing and was fascinated by the imagery in all these stories. I drew pictures on any clean bits of paper I could find (and they were scarce in those days).
Maybe a formative moment was when, aged around 4, my brother and I were taken to see Santa Claus in a store in Exeter. Bearing in mind I knew Sooty had a magic wand and ‘oofle dust’, I knew what I wanted for Xmas. I asked Santa for my own magic wand, or at least some oofle dust. He laughed and said I would have to make my own magic. This was a profound disappointment as I knew he certainly had access to plenty of magic in doing his own job. I’d developed a fixation on somehow finding some magic for myself.
I liked drawing and making figures out of modelling clay. Dad showed me all sorts of ways to make models and at age 7 he showed me the rudiments of drawing in perspective. This was a kind of magical revelation. Now I could actually create pictures on paper and make them look real, just like in the fantastical stories in the comics.
When I was 8 the family moved to Plymouth and I became a city boy. I missed the countryside and much of my drawing recreated that lost world of fields, trees and rivers. On the wall in my primary school classroom was an impressionist painting of a French, sunlit street under plane trees. I marvelled at the way it created the atmosphere of that place. For art we had powder colours, mostly red, yellow, blue, black and white in one palette and which we mixed in six sections of a second palette. When I asked for different colours I was told we could make any other colours by mixing those supplied. We couldn’t, of course. Each table of four got one mixing palette so it soon got mucky. We painted on sheets of grey ‘sugar’ paper which rimpled as it got wet. Neither could we paint accurately with the bent stubs of the old hogbristle brushes provided. I looked again at that wonderful impressionist picture on the wall and my 8 year old mind thought that if this was what the world painted with, then that guy must have been brilliant!
Dad had a job working night shifts on the Western Morning News as a typesetter and to make ends meet my parents also ran our big town house as a guest house. My brother and I were enrolled in the wolf cubs and church choir to get us out from under parents’ feet. At weekends and holidays we’d be told to “go to the park” – anything to get us out of the house. On Saturday night we became a musical family, with a piano, a ukulele and a guitar and mum and dad encouraged us to play and sing along with them.
We had two younger sisters and a baby brother who we also had to chaperone to the park from time to time.
When I was about 12 years old we got a TV. For me, one of the tea-time highlights was Adrian Hill’s weekly ‘Sketch Club”. He extended my understanding of perspective, using charcoal and chalk on grey paper, showing how to create a sense of three-dimensional space with light and shadow. He drew trees, houses, cars, cranes and even building sites, illustrating stacks of blocks and pipes. It broadened my world of landscape and my understanding of light and form. I soaked it all up and it revitalised my love of drawing. I took all this into my school art lessons.
I was, I suppose, an academic child. I liked reading and writing and could do mental arithmetic. I passed the 11+ exam and went on to an academic secondary school.
In a very demanding school environment the only thing I excelled at was art. Drawing was fine, but in painting we used the same powder colours, grey paper and bent brushes as at primary school. It was frustrating. So when, at age 13, I was told that my prospects would be better served by concentrating on sciences, languages, and maths, I wasn’t disappointed to drop art as a subject. Art in school wasn’t as exciting as other subjects and activities. My focus was on biology, chemistry, physics, rugby, tennis and squash in school, or football or table tennis for the local youth club in the Plymouth and District league. I was learning the piano and sang in both school and church choirs so art was squeezed totally off my radar for the next three years in my early teens.
I had morning and evening paper rounds which earned me money to buy football boots and tennis shoes, and extracurricular activities meant I was always behind with my academic studies. I wasn’t a model student and it was a struggle to find time to meet the demanding expectations of my school. I was regularly in trouble for being behind with school work.
When I was 15 I went to Spain with the school scouts, camping, hiking and climbing in the Pyrenees. On return I had an impulse to paint – the mountainous landscape had impressed me.
I found an old paint box and painted a watercolour of sorts on a rough piece of paper. I showed the school art teacher Doug Holland, whose classes I had long abandoned, and he suggested I get some oil paints.
This was the start of my reconnection with the drawing and painting of my earlier childhood. Over that year I painted a few pictures on oil-painting paper and showed them once again to the art teacher. This time he suggested I get some sheets of hardboard, prime them with white emulsion paint and paint bigger pictures. For the first time I had found a medium, oils, through which I could actually make paintings that properly created three-dimensional images in realistic colour on a two-dimensional surface. I had a place into which my imagination could step and this really did feel like a kind of magic. I took some landscape paintings to a local quality furniture store that also sold pictures and they actually agreed to put them on their walls. They even sold one or two for me.
I was motivated. I loved painting and sometimes I was even getting paid for doing it! Through my A level years I made time for painting when I could. Sport was still my main love but I got my A level science qualifications and set off for university.
I went to Nottingham University to study biochemistry, physiology and nutrition. In my first term there was a painting exhibition to which any student could submit a picture. I painted a blazing sunset over a river, against some trees. To my surprise it sold for £10 and that was a great help in extending my student grant of £147 per term. It meant I could buy a new pair of football boots and my first new tennis racquet. (£10 then in 1966 is like £300 today).
At the end of a term, instead of looking for a holiday job, I painted pictures. I had the novelty of a new region of landscape – the Midlands flood plain of the Trent, and its tributaries and canals. The field systems, the types of trees, the slow watercourses and the old redbrick farms were all new to me and I found pleasure in painting them. Some paintings I sold back in Plymouth, some in the university and others in a local pub and an art shop. I was enjoying finding new techniques, and was always fascinated by creating an atmosphere in whatever picture I was painting. That was the thing which drew me on – the sense of how it felt to ‘dwell in the atmosphere’ of the picture.
In the back of my mind I began to speculate, fantasise even one might say, about whether I would ever be able to make my love of painting landscape a way of life. Would it offer a measure of freedom – an access to a world beyond a more workaday existence?
Ever since I’d been obliged to go to school at age 5 I had felt ‘fenced in by the system’. Part of me wanted to find a gateway out of that ‘system’ into the beautiful world outside the window – and what better way than to paint that beautiful world. The workaday world exists in a straitjacket of time, but my world of landscape painting was timeless – I could dream it becoming anything I wanted it to be.
But I knew there would be many hard yards ahead before I could realise that dream.
