Always having a love for music, it was this that allowed me to escape from the drudgery of office work and at 20 I became a member of the Brownsville Jug Band, a professional comedy folk/jazz outfit, playing throughout the U.K. and Europe. This lasted throughout the seventies and early eighties.

All through this time I had still painted and drawn, visiting exhibitions whenever I could.

In 1989 I did a Foundation course in Art & Design at Salford University. This gave me the determination and single–mindedness to commit myself to painting.

Having painted in an abstract manner for several years, I gradually felt the need for my art to be “grounded” in the real. I needed to recognise the world around me in my paintings.

My style is guided by a joy in spontaneity and expressiveness and I always aim for a vitality and roughness of expression in the final image.”

“My painting lies in the region between abstraction and representation, unwilling as I am to lose the visible world entirely. What I am seeking to express is the essential inner life of things, the pulsation of nature’s elements, its life force exposed. All of my paintings are executed in a passionate and vibrant manner using painting knives which give my pictures a rich surface texture and depth of colour.”