ABOUT THE ARTIST
I was born in Bedford at the 'Wait for the Wagon' public house which is now called the Blarney Stone. From an early age I was interested in art and encouraged to develop my creativity, I focused mainly on pencil, charcoal and Indian ink drawings as this enabled me to do highly detailed work. At the age of sixteen I had an Indian ink drawing of an Owl illustrated in ‘Bir
d Life’ magazine and sold my first picture at the age of nineteen. Attending Art College soon after liberated me from just drawing and I started experimenting using other mediums and playing with colours and texture. I am influenced greatly by wildlife and the natural world; I especially like the effects gained by using Pastels, producing work that gives a very surreal effect, achieved by using heavy shadows together with night landscapes. I ran a Bird hospital from 1979 to 1989, which took in over 500 birds in one year; this resulted in two television appearances. The injured birds and wildlife proved to be an ideal subject matter for my work enabling me to produce detailed paintings from life with creatures at such close quarters, seldom achieved with photographs of the subject. I have exhibited at the Eagle Gallery in Castle Road Bedford and taken part in a number of Open Studio, Bedford Art Society and Artist Network events over the years. I regularly have my work selected for the Mall Galleries Pastel Exhibition in London, winning the Easel Award in 2007. I have won several art prizes at the Luton Open Art Exhibition in recent years and one of my pictures (‘Legend of the Deep’) was voted by visitors to the Exhibition as the best picture in the gallery.
