About the Artist
I studied Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London School of Art and Saint Martin's School of Art, London.
I then abandoned London to live in Botswana, swopping seven urban concrete years for an inhospitable arid terrain populated by aloes and acacia and sand and rock. For five years I lived and worked in a remote lands area, and my studio was a clay rondavel with a thatched roof. After leaving behind the noisy conviviality of the college art hub, I welcomed the solitude of my circular mud hut..
In Botswana, I taught art in the small local school, and I also set up a charity to provide funds for five children per annum to attend secondary school, which was not free. I became the artist in residence for the Museum in Gaborone, designing visual aids for a mobile school, the Zebra’s Voice which toured outlying villages scattered around this vast desert scape. Additionally, I was invited to paint two 60-foot long murals in Gaborone Hospital: one of the Kalahari Desert and the other of the Okavango. During this period, I also exhibited at various exhibitions primarily in South Africa.
In 1985, however, I returned to London and began another life chapter as the Creative Director of a small heritage company working in the decorative arts sector. And there I stayed for over 30 years, immersed in pattern and colour through textiles, wallpaper, and passementerie. It was a privilege to contribute to the interior development of many grand houses in the UK and abroad; but it was also a professional career path that left no room for my own art. Finally, in early 2025, I quit and fled back to the family home in rural Herefordshire.
My work:
Even as a child, I would paint and draw en plain air, and nothing has changed. I still head off to the hills and woods with my paint brushes in hand. It has been a romance to live and walk the Black Mountains since 1992 when we as a family settled in an ancient Long house on the side of a hill. Now at last I was to have the time to put to canvas and paper my affection for this land.