I was born in India and spent my formative years in Kashmir, where I began my lifelong love of nature. I returned to school in England and lived in the family mill house and then on a farm in Suffolk where I was free to develop my interest in recording my immediate environment.
I went on to study fine art at the Slade and then to teach at Cranbrook and Tonbridge schools. In due course I moved to Clifton to work as Director of Art at Clifton College where I remained until I retired. My interest in wide-ranging technical and historical aspects of painting was fulfilled in a period spent in tutoring an Open University History of Art degree course. My own painting developed and matured in tandem with this protracted career.
I love the freedom of working on large canvasses and I am inspired by the random and bursting energy of vegetal life, which is mirrored by my own output and enthusiasms. I am particularly inspired by the play of light and shadow on the landscape, and on the formal structure of plant life which endures in skeletal seed heads and seed pods.
The painting are all oil on canvas, and the ceramics are reduction fired stoneware. This process can produce a particularly earthy and organic quality, and renders them completely water and frost proof - as I know from those that have been in my own garden for many years.
Over the years I have exhibited in many different venues, including the RWA Bristol, the Bristol Guild, the New Metropole Gallery Folkestone, Gallery 27 Bristol, the Alpha Gallery Sherborne, Ruskin Mill Nailsworth, The Fiery Beacon Painswick, The Gallery Tenterden, and at Agnews of Bond Street. I also have ceramics and painting in private collections in Holland, France, Italy and the United States.