60 and ON
My introduction to art and creativity as such began as a 14-15 year old. My father's major hobby was philosophy and was well involved as secretary of the "Tavistock Society". He was very interested in the sixties swathe of folk music, culminating on Bob Dylan.
I had been through the beat explosion and the mod bands, the psychedelic thing was happening. It seemed to be hung upon music, happenings, posters and alternative news papers.
I got involved in all of them.
I played drums in semi pro bands, the first important one being the Stoned Raisens.
Through the music I had met and become aquainted with Alexis Korner, who I thought was the very definition of cool.
And I was working at Yoko Ono's flat for her previous husband with a couple of other band members on a sound project, I only bumped into her twice but I was pretty well overwhelmed by the whole scenario.
This was before she met John Lennon.
My introduction to art and creativity as such began as a 14-15 year old. My father's major hobby was philosophy and was well involved as secretary of the "Tavistock Society". He was very interested in the sixties swathe of folk music, culminating on Bob Dylan.
I had been through the beat explosion and the mod bands, the psychedelic thing was happening. It seemed to be hung upon music, happenings, posters and alternative news papers.
I got involved in all of them.
I played drums in semi pro bands, the first important one being the Stoned Raisens.
Through the music I had met and become aquainted with Alexis Korner, who I thought was the very definition of cool.
And I was working at Yoko Ono's flat for her previous husband with a couple of other band members on a sound project, I only bumped into her twice but I was pretty well overwhelmed by the whole scenario.
This was before she met John Lennon.
Keith Troesdale
Nick South
Poster paint mural on a large front bedroom wall, Rylett Road 68
On moving to Chiswick Polytechnic, I ran the student newspaper on an old Gestetner printing machine.
I had also spent much of my formative years in the scouts learning how to set up camp sites: a mind set I have yet to loose.
A white lightening drawing made in a flat in Earls Court with a bunch of bikers and one of the most incredible views of bed-sit land I will ever come across.
Oil painting produced after a near religious experience involving a Persian rug.
Drawings produced at the house in Hounslow Heath that we rented for a few months at the end of the runway and frequented by Hawkwind and various other fairly dangerous bods.
This all merged into the foundation year at Epsom where I was allowed, indeed prompted to indulge in wild flights of fantasy.
The guy that steered me through it was Arthur Wilson, whose two sons (Tony and Richard) I had grown up with and who are indeed still practising artists.
During the course of my foundation year, the family home moved to Narberth, in an isolated spot in Pembrokeshire.
Chicken wire picture stretched over a dark green felt notice board.
It started from a black and white line cartoon in a comic of an irate chap taking a swipe at his neighbour over the fence.
Mah Jong,
A game mu family had become interested in which became the stimulus for a project instigated by Arthur Wilson who helped me build the cross and stitch the canvas.
I told me that I ought to learn how to ask people for help.
It's about five feet high and contains the four winds and a dragon in the middle. I wish I had a better image.
I deliberately made the central dragon sloppy and unfinished, contrived you might say, at my interview for Cardiff (failed) they told me that was the best bit of painting of mine they had seen.
Did the crap start there?
I'm not sure what this was, I believe it was part of a hi-brid thingy involving a snake and petals. It satisfied my thirst for psycadelic image whatever.
- later moving into the eidetic.
From this point on, everywhere from which I operated was interspersed with some time spent at Shipping Hill.
Licking wounds, formulating ideas. Actually creating work, or downright partying!
Ruth Robinson
At this time, I met Simon Rich, who at a relatively young age had set up his own pottery in Narberth.
I still know him as a friend and have always seen his craft as existing on an ongoing parallel progressive line
to mine.
Fine Art course at Epsom.
A traditional painting course – one of the only ones going on in the country at that time.
Tutors:
Leslie Worth
John Hacker
Geoff Broadway
Eric Rodway.
Learning how to paint in a catholic way. I worked on nudes and landscapes.
The latter started to become more significant due to my growing involvement with Shipping Hill.
I started going up there to paint with Tony Wright and Julian Pefanis: Two American painting students who weren't in Vietnam, we shaped each others learning quite profoundly.
Moon and bonfire.
Following a series of studies of ancient South American art.
A painting about the bonfires I used to make and sit by in the evenings outside my caravan at Shipping Hill, when the wood was particularly dry it would shoot up into the night sky becoming "sprites" on the way up.
I saw these as near enough symblolic of souls of different life forces. Maybe a little akin to how people light candles in churches.
We felt that painting was the one important creative activity and anything else simply got in its way. We spent time painting pictures together, the start of a lot of the work we made in London Surrey Arts a bit later on.
At that point in time "Art and Language" was just evolving: stating that painting was dead as a contemporary art form. We duely reacted against this, without realising that by doing so, we were re-evaluating everything we stood for.
The very goal of the enemy!
King Harvest has surely come.
In painting terms I was beginning to realise at this point that there was (or so I thought) a battle between the doodle and the representational – the subjective and the objective.
Spring Panel
Painted in my large room in a communal house in Tadworth,just outside the downs and racecourse, a truly beutiful place to live, maybe one of the happiest times of my life.
Our back garden in Tadworth through the conservarory window.
Stream Panels.
All the information came from the stream in Shipping Hill, I was especially interested in the eskimo type patterns formed on the surface of the water. I drew them all fro observation. I felt that useing camera images was cheating!
It was painted in my College studio in the Post Office Annexe overlooking Epsom Clock Tower which I shared With Nina Gieble and the pigeons
I started to move onto panels just before my final year, they seemed to carry my painting thought process very comfortably and still do on occasion, to this day.
The Bramble Panels
Painted in my caravan in Pembrokeshire during the summer holidays just before my final year.
They started off as just one panel which I painted over (to my regret) in order not to be too influenced by it on the whole set of work which was to be produced conjointly.
Many of the bramble leaves were painted out as white and then layered with colour, making it maybe a little cumbersome paint wise.
I was really intrigued with the patterns forming from the groupes of leaves, something that obviously evolved from my hypnotic interest with carpets.
different clusters became different symbols, took on different meanings, represented different moods.
This came about during the time it took to paint them giving me time to daydream as I knitted it together.
Link to album of college work from Epsom:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150351267821424.401522.707526423&l=cb661437fa
At the end of the course, I spent a couple of months hitching around the South of France painting water colours with Barbara Young.
Early stuff from mainly Phil in his bedsit in Ashtead Surrey, This was us regrouping after we had left Art College and hangs mainly around his ideas for songs.
The first recordings we made in Balham with Colin Browne and Phil Gray, Pity I wasnt the name of a colour.
The Seasons
Garnsworthy Hall, Epsom
1975
Most of these were painted in and around Shipping Hill the year and a bit after I left art college. I was told that I should have got into a post grad course just to channel my various work, but maybe because it was various, I didn't get in!
I suppose what I did was maybe not so much channel, but choose & focus into one direction and these are what I came up with.
At present just a few of the photos Ive able to get my hands on - more to come.
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| Wet February Water down a caravan window. |
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| March stormy skies |
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| "Mopsy's wallpaper" A character I used in my "Golly Books", which were basically writing about the changes in nature. He was a small rodent half-way between a hedgehog & a mole. March |
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| March, boundary rocks. (with Tim Mapson?) |
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| Moist & Earthy. Now with Barbara Young. April |
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| May Back Garden - Tadworth. |
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| till the end of the day. The Kinks June |
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| July Summer Valley (listen for the rush) |
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| High & Gently Rolling. words from a song by Phil Gray August |
I produced the original crayon drawing in a commune in Dumfries that I briefly stayed in with Sue Macleod. We were visiting a potter called Steve that I know whose second name escapes me but whose father was the man who did all the research work used in Watership Down,
-Locksley!!
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| Mushrooms October now with Wendy Richard |
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| Road in Ashtead Surrey October |
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| "weird window" October, now with Rupert Crane |
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| Let me take you down October |
Reflection in the water from the stream in Early Autumn. Shipping Hill
Link to show:
On leaving Epsom I moved to Bromley and shared the upstairs of a house with a New Zealand pottery student: Sue Macleod. Gravitating between there and Shipping Hill.
I became part of a self perpetuating organisation called L.S.A. which was basically four painters working collaboratively on paintings shows and projects. We were trying to trick new things out of each other.
First ticket for London Surrey Arts, produced on a small hand held printer.
And produced a fair amount of work and shows.
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Alone, breathing urgently. 28-02-77
One of a series of work produced about spring and the fact that it had not arrived yet!
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By myself I was producing a lot of stuff to do with nature and being outdoors and was part of a lot of shows.
Until I left everything and moved to Cardiff.
78 X ON
Initially, my whole experience was one of regrouping and redefining my capabilities and needs.
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| Paros |
During this period I met my wife, Anne Armstrong, we decided that we wanted to travel and as a result, pretty well most of our resources went towards saving up to do just that.
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| Naxos |
As a trial run, we went to Greece for three months, living on a shoestring, I painted a series of landscapes from outside our moving tent on a daily basis.
Link to set of watercolours produced from a tent:
Friday November 3rd 78
But first chronologically (is)
we come into port on the boat and
BANG
What is happening?!*@
Looking up, there is the town
but it is 3-400feet up above our heads and hovering in mid air.
And just the lights mind you - because itis night and dark.
It was a bit like a collage picture
like two pictures cut in half and swapped around
then stuck together - two new pictures
or
a T.V. set that has its picture jammed halfway
complete with the line.
We stood at the side of the boat and tried not to fall over
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| Battle in an egg |
On our return, I worked in the archaeology department at Cardiff University and took on some more Adventure Play work in the valleys.
Cardiff Streets as seen from the Archaeology Dept UCC
I also took on an evening course in ceramics.
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| Run by Pete Morgan at Llanover Hall Arts Centre. |
80 x ON
At this point we went to India, something that I had been building towards for years.
This was a real changing point in my life.
There is before India and after.
We were also travelling about very cheaply and actually got to visit many different places. Whilst also settling down for reasonable periods of time in a few. But also doing a lot of travelling in between settling down.
Udaipur, Rajasthan. October to December 80
Hecktor Chrome, from Jog Falls Karnataka, December 80.
An ex leftenant who liked to live dangerously, found the falls and initially swam under them by himself not haveing any idea of what kind of danger he might be putting himself in.
He used to leave a zig zag arrow in places he had been called a zorch.
Jog Falls, Karnataka
The highest falls in Asia. It was the dry season and we swam under them with Hector Chrome. There were circular rainbows in the water and rocks of humbug and black glass.
Varkala, Kerala. January to March 81
Chamba, Himashal Pradesh.
Beyond Big Big
Bharmor H.P.
I produced a large amount of paper work which I posted home.
I also sent back a large series of airmail correspondence referring to where I was and illustrated it.
I thought of it in terms of a book.
Proposed cover for the Aviator thought book which was a series of line drawings on mainly blue airmail sheets, form the Gosani Palace house boat in Srinagar to Leh with various stops in between.
One I called " If you cant be fast - be furious"
And was based or at least started around our time in Srinagar.
Puri, Orissa
A WOODEN OM
During my stay in India, I also compiled a book consisting of airmail letters that I frequently posted to various friends and family that I felt could actually be trusted to look after them for a year or so. The name was inspired by Tony Wright who's last comment to me before leaving was "watch out for wooden oms!" He wrote a preface for it.
I have in following years added a bit to it.
It never got published, but I did hold a show in Cardiff University called by the same name a few years later.
There is a page in Loons encyclopedia covering it in much greater depth.
An even better link!
