Context
Without doubt, I prefer some of the sketches, and unfinished works here to the pictures I have in my gallery. I set up the gallery some years ago. The stuff I included in it was what I had photographed or scanned at the time, for whatever reason. The finished stuff here is neither better nor worse. One of the pictures here was accepted by the Royal Academy for one summer show. There's also one in the gallery that was. Not that I put that forward as a criterion of excellence. I'm fairly sure that the one in the gallery got hung because it was the right size and colour. When I went to see it I was disappointed to see how insignificant, and badly painted it looked. The room looked great though. It was the one that Peter Blake did.
The "Artist As A Young Man" picture is the earliest here. It was dated 1961 so as to qualify for entry into an exhibition. In fact it was painted in 1958, when I was 19. I was still living with my family in Gorleston in Norfolk. I affected the angry demeanour that was expected of a young man at that time. In truth, I was rather contented. I had a long stretch of coast to walk whenever I needed to get my head straight. I was attending college in Norwich. I sported a duffle coat and a college scarf. I was a founder member of a jazz club in Great Yarmouth. I painted the posters for their sessions at the Penrice Arms. I'd reached drinking age, and I was earning a little beer money from summer work. The only cloud on the horizon was the slowly increasing pressure on me to figure out how I was going to earn a living.
In 1959 I got a job as a computer programmer with Glaxo Laboratories. I moved into a small furnished room in a house called The Hermitage in Fulham Palace Road. I was very happy there. A happy recluse. I had a Berec Demon portable radio and a Phillips Disc Jockey record player. Radio was very good in those days. There were loads of plays by Ionesco, Jarry, Pinter, Chekov, Ibsen, Shakespeare and the like. Good solid stuff. Good classical music too, on the Third Program. I had 3 library books a week from the Hammersmith Library. The books I read then are the books I'm re-reading now. Camus, Sartre, Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Elliot, Cocteau, Huxley, Durrell...and many more. There was a small cinema in Putney High Street that showed a good selection of foreign films. So much was new to me. So many facilities all at once. I went to Museums and art galleries, and jazz clubs. I had an off licence just around the corner, and the Greyhound with its horseshoe bar just up the road. I bought occasional copies of the Evergreen Review in Charing Cross Road and my records second-hand in Dobell's Jazz Record Shop. I morphed from angry young man to beatnik
Every few weeks I'd go and see my parents and friends in Norfolk. It was during these train rides and the breaks away from London that I developed a feeling about the countryside and the coast that I wanted to express. This was all mixed up with ideas about pantheism that I'd picked up from my reading. Many of the sketches I did in Fulham Palace Road arose from this. There were paintings too. These, the results of long coffee-fuelled sessions into the night hardly ever matched my expectations. Very few survived to completion. Those that did were eventually painted over, or given away. I sold a couple.
During this time I was I was so impressed by the works of Picasso, Braque, Sutherland, Piper, Nicholson, Moore, Nash, Klee, Ernst, and others, that I found it difficult to compose without making reference to them. But, looking back at what I have around me, This doesn't seem to show. What I see is that I had my own style, and still have it.
For three years I was drawing and painting in a dedicated sort of way. I had a half-formed notion that one day I'd stop working for a living. My employers, seeing the effects of lack of sleep, warned me that I needed to choose between my painting and my programming. The scales fell from my eyes. For the next 15 years or so, painting became an occasional week-end activity. I still sketched stuff in stolen moments, but the major part of my time was devoted to my career in IT.
It was my work as a programmer that took me to Gothenburg in Sweden in 1975. I lived there for 9 years. I'd had a spiritual yearning for the north since the early 60s when I'd developed a love for the music of Sibelius. Gothenburg is a fantastic place to live. From my flat it was just 15 minutes walk to the centre of the city. Twenty minutes in the opposite direction would take me into forest and lakeland that was potentially without end. I didn't drive a car for the whole time I was there. I met Katrina. We bought bicycles. And begat Micheal.
I began to feel myself to be an artist again. My time in Gothenburg turned out to be as productive as in the Fulham Palace Road days.
The picture of Katrina and our cat Tiger looking out over the harbour in Gothenburg is finished. I didn't regard it as so when I left off painting it, but its been around the studio so long that I've got used to it. I like it. If I changed it, I'd miss it. It's very unlikely that I'd end up with a better picture. My opening comment about finished and unfinished works very well describes my creative standpoint.
The pictures in the Rainstorm Room were not painted in Gothenburg. They were painted in Tunbridge Wells. Along with a number of others, they are a nostalgic look back to the time in Sweden. We moved here in 1984. I'm not that keen on the town itself, but its situation on the Kent and Sussex border puts it in easy reach of richly diverse stretches of coast, the heathland of Ashdown Forest, and the north and south downlands. Up until 2 years ago I was working in London. Now, at last, I have the time to paint as much as I like. For the present I'm working on pictures of the forest in Pihlajaniemi in eastern Finland. That's where Katrina comes from. I expect to work more and more towards abstraction. To that end there's probably enough material in a few sketches to last me many years.
There are diversions however. I still write computer programs. I have a web page devoted to NP-Complete problems. There are aspects of these problems and the method of solution that I've applied to them that have metaphysical implications. They appeal to the creative side of my nature as much as painting does. The TSP problem in particular, which can be visualised, prompts the question "Is it art?". If by art you include some of the Saatchi stuff and the Turner Prize winners, it certainly is.
