I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil and have continued to draw, sometimes obsessively, ever since.
Born just after the war, paper was still in scarce supply but my mother discovered a cheap and plentiful source in the form of unprinted newsprint. I would use up to 100 sheets a week, usually sitting up in bed to draw, when the light should have been out. I even drew, unchecked, on my bedroom walls and round the margins of all my books.
The subject matter was wide ranging, from the ballet dancers seen performing Coppelia at The New Theatre Oxford to my design ideas for building the Pyramids.
We lived on the northern edge of the Berkshire Downs and I have always been drawn to the outdoors and to wide open spaces. I spent ten years living in Western Australia, working and travelling in some of the remotest desert regions in the world, and after returning to England I lived for twelve years in a remote Suffolk cottage. The garden had no fence, opening straight out into the fields, with the ever-changing East Anglian sky as my horizon.
I now live in West London near the river but return to paint in Walberswick and along the Blyth Estuary each summer.
