Trained at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford High Wycombe Art School, I have been a practising artist for most of my life, working mainly in oils, but latterly in watercolours and pastels.
My abstract oil paintings are spatial enquiries seeking to express philosophical ideas by conveying the illusion of movement through fervent glowing colour, dynamic rhythm and expressing tension and harmony as dots, associations with existing objects, autonomous patterns of lines, splashes and arabesques, but throughout attempting to maintain an inherent principle of balance. In a sense I am trying to create metaphors of an eternally circulating liquidised world that embraces the viewer, remaining philosophical yet decorative.
Using oil paint on canvas gives me great flexibility when reworking the colour, and my pictures evolve throughout production so the finished canvas may bear only some resemblance to the idea I originally sketched out. This allows me to keep a degree of spontaneity in my work. I frequently pursue a subject farther and produce a series of oils on the same theme.
I am heavily indebted to the artists of the Bauhaus and the Expressionists of 1930s Germany for my interest in the effects that colours and abstract shapes have upon one another, to the 1960s for the sheer explosion of exuberant colour, the rapid developments in art, Op Art, and Psychedelic Art.
I also owe a great deal to the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford, where I received a very classical figurative training during the late 1960s. The emphasis on accurate draughtsmanship and colour sense has stayed with me throughout my artistic and working career as a graphic designer.
My watercolours display a different side of my personality, serving as visual documents of my travels at home and abroad.
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