MY OWN WORK

My own work is domestic and small scale.  It is for looking at and enjoying in a home environment.  It is not meant to dominate or obtrude or to take up a whole museum wall, but just to be there and to feed the spirit and imagination.  Balm for the soul, if you like. 

If a painting of mine does that and, most importantly, goes on doing that, then I am happy: it is a good painting as far as I am concerned.

I am not setting out to build a career – it is a bit late for that anyway – but to let my imagination wander over what I have seen, years ago or yesterday, and to let my mind and hands synthesise that into a painting or, more rarely these days, a sculpture.  This will probably not resemble at all what I have been looking at; it will be some new creation that comes from my imagination.

Of course many of my pictures are recognisably hatched from the same egg, because my mind is preoccupied by the same stimuli, and returns to them again and again.  So my painting has themes, half a dozen maybe, and they are my source material.  But I also go off at perhaps ridiculous tangents when something catches my eye or amuses me.  Why not? 

These tangential paintings tend to be one-offs, or at most a few, then that stimulus is gone. I painted dog pictures one summer because the Merriscourt Gallery in Oxfordshire was having an exhibition on the theme of dogs.  I loved doing that, to my surprise, and did fifteen or so dog paintings.  They were lightweight and by no stretch of the imagination great art.  They were fun.  They still make me smile, so at some level they must be okay.

For me, painting, or at least making, is not an interest or a pastime: it is a compulsion.  I find that there is a need in me to be making things and all my life I have done so in one medium or another, not always paint. In the l970s and 1980s all my work was in wood and metal and included automata and articulated wooden dogs which sold in galleries around the world.