Paint - Draw - Print

My art is multi faceted but fits within three classic activities: Drawing, Painting and Printing.

I am based and indeed am a founder artist member of Chisenhale Art Place in an old veneer factory, in London’s East End, near Victoria Park, where we built the studios with our own hands in 1980.

My work begins ‘Plain air,’ outside, before nature - nature being a deep nurture, having journeyed at some effort to draw, loosely speaking -‘landscape.’ My concerns are various, the movement of elemental forces, the forests and fields that ride them or the particular, a peculiar insect clambering amongst the grasses at my feet and of the harmonic or more usually, discordant stamp of human activity upon it.

Not long after building the studios, I embarked on a communal project, which involved the local school. This set off an arts program now known as our Public Program, in which I am still involved. I also privately teach groups or individuals in my studio in any of the above aspects – one of which may be egg tempera painting.

I discovered egg tempera when searching, during an abstract phase, for a quick drying paint but have explored since then the richness of this lovely medium with its brilliance of colour and subtle translucencies. Having initially experimented with it in a brave fashion, have come to embrace some of its traditions, such as its chalky grounds of gesso, putting these on shapes of pulped paper and wooden panels – strangely an ancient practice but with a modern twist.

My interest in printmaking is a democratic one, as printing can make art more available, something I sincerely believe in. Having found a printing method that really appealed to me in the form of woodcut then broke from it to develop the obtuse need to do ‘woodcut with brushes’ and eventually invented Castprinting. This is a proper printing technique on which articles have been written. I have taught it in schools and colleges at home and abroad and once in a prison……