ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Derbyshire England. I lived in Italy in the late 1980's. I moved from southern England to the Bay Area in 1989 and haven't been back in over a decade.

Growing up, painting was just what we did. My success came so freely that for many years I rejected the notion pushed upon me by my teachers at Waldorf School that in life I would excel at art to the exclusion of all other pursuits. At fifteen I left home in England without telling my parents and set off to seek my fortune. While traveling I had a feeling of going nowhere internally. In Italy I narrowly survived drowning off the coast of the island of Ischia. The indescribable experience of feeling my life pulled out from under me in a state of incompleteness filled me with a driving need for completion and inward travel. I returned to England and started painting seriously. At 19 I came to the San Francisco Bay Area with the intention of visiting family and attending Art College. I arrived here nearly fifteen years ago, and have been influenced and changed dramatically by this place and my experiences here. For instance, I now work a day job at a hi-tech corporation. However I came as a painter and I am still painting today, much in the same way that I speak "American" now, but I never lost my native accent.

Writings: In western culture ink is the medium of writing and literature

For the first seven years of my time in the US I carried a small notebook in my pocket into which I diligently wrote thoughts, ideas, insights and aphorisms. I had this idea that if I stopped what I was doing and wrote every time I had an idea, a poetic thought or realization, no matter how inconvenient, that I would become like a lightening rod for ideas that were out in the ether ready to come into existence and looking for a receptor. I had compiled a case packed full of these booklets into a loosely structured book, some of which I would read and get immense inspiration out of. On my 25th birthday I packed them all up, went to the library and a cafe and spent a very fulfilling day organizing and categorizing and editing these writings; in the evening I took a break from this and drove to temple, which was just a few minutes from where I lived. I was in temple for an hour or two. When I got back to my car, the passenger side window was smashed, and the case holding all my writings and notebooks were gone. The only writings I had left were in the book in my back pocket.  This was the first registered burglary in this neighborhood in fifteen years. I had long hair down to my waist which I cut off, I abandoned color, I started to paint in black ink, turning my use of ink from writing into painting. I painted on the cheap sketch paper pads that had belonged to my girlfriend’s brother who had died tragically at age seventeen. That year I painted in excess of 300 black and white paintings, it was my most prolific year to date. None of the writings were recovered.