About Me

My Early Career and Current Work Influences

I arrived in ‘swinging’ London in the late 60’s to attend a textile degree course at Central School of Art and Design and just knew I had found my spiritual home. A couple of years later I was awarded an RSA travel bursary for the National Textile Design in printed textiles. This enabled me to travel extensively in Portugal and Spain.

On leaving Central I continued to freelance mainly for the European market, selling extensively to Liberty’s, Cacharel and Rasch. This was followed by a period at the John Lewis Display Studios London. There I became part of the design team working on both interior designs and window displays for their UK wide stores.

It was after my first daughters birth and an interview within an Art Foundation course that I turned to lecturing, hoping that the creative environment would help me to continue with my passion for printmaking. In between lecturing I began to experiment more widely within silkscreen prints and finally rolled oil images. Those images of rolled oil monotypes captured the held memories of colour, form and movement experienced in mid 70’s whilst driving the western coastal road of the USA from Vancouver through Mendocino County to LA. Unknown to me at the time I had no idea how much the ‘bay area’ abstract expressionist would play such an influential and significant part in my later work.

Today, I still love the medium of print. I love the discipline and structure within its various techniques. I love the freedom of expression it affords me in my work and still maintain an experimental and playful use of  colour palettes. I love how colour can elude to different emotional states. My work deals heavily with the layering of colour and texture. These interests essentially produce decorative, abstract pieces. That said, they all have tenuous links to real-world situations. The emotional elements of these images rely heavily on my love of recurring palettes. These palettes are influenced both by the natural world and by colours taken from modern urban environments. Some pieces rely on expansive areas of colour alone, whilst others are augmented by layers of texture and free hand mark making. All are inspired by my interest of the mundane, random, atrophy of the world around me.