After graduating from the Bath Academy of Art, I took my MFA in sculpture at Yale University in 1971 and then a teaching fellowship at the University of Auckland NZ.
Returning to London in 1977, I joined the video/performance collective at 2B Butler’s Wharf producing video performances and presenting these at venues in the UK and Ireland.
I continued to exhibit installation/performances and drawings in Britain while teaching on an evolving interactive art programme at the University of Wales, Newport. I was awarded a PhD in 2008 with a thesis on the artistic legacy of military conscription on the work of Marcel Duchamp. I retired from teaching in 2010. The works featured on this site follow on from this time.
The way I work
Living on the lower reaches of the tidal river Wye I am drawn to its relentlessly changing personality. Currents beneath the surface create upsurges that are difficult to predict and always problematic to draw. Because of the river I suppose I’m attracted to subjects that result from similar internal processes. In my own experience pencils work best when depicting static things and not when contending with the mutability of, for instance, a powerfully turning tide. If I could get my pencils to decipher the stresses and strains that I know exist beneath the surface of the river, it might become less compelling for me. Nevertheless, many of the drawings on this website have been made because of, or on, the river and now form a distinct part in my total collection of work.
I’m also an amateur singer, attracted to the classical repertoire and recently I have been drawing professional singers in performance. I have added some of these drawings to the website with the most recent examples of Alice Coote in ‘Winterreise lockdown’. I try to reflect my own experience of managing my breath in a way that will meet the requirements of a score. I try not to associate this process too closely with the powerful undercurrents of the muddy river Wye, nevertheless the accommodations I have to make in order to achieve the sounds of a song prove to be equally and unfathomably obscure . Perhaps better conveyed in different media and with different methods and procedures I choose to make my drawings, very conventionally, with pencils on paper.
Away from the river I have drawn in the flooded fields behind Tintern Abbey (2020/22 ‘Flood Plane’) on the floor before a sculptural frieze of Buddhas in India (2015/17 ‘Seven Senior Citizens’) and listening to singers and their accompanists in concert halls (2020/2022 ‘Recitalists’). In the same way I drew the rain obscured WWI battlefield at Mametz Wood where the artist David Jones was wounded (Drawings 2017/19 Mametz Wood). Elsewhere the sea defences at Syracuse in Sicily became the subject, which I then reimagined, back home, while being carried by the current on the muted, wintery waters of the river (2017/19 Syracuse-upon-Wye).
Due to the limited space on this site I have only shown samples of my work. For other details to do with this work please contact me.