Looking back over my time as an artist.
I have been interested in art since childhood, but after leaving school took a career in horticulture, which I found to be very creative, designing landscapes, woodlands, parks, playing fields and planting up shopping precincts, highways and in the autumn planting mass drifts of daffodils and tulips. This career took me all over UK lasting 30 years. While in Darlington I joined the local art society and started to paint in oils. I submitted a painting in their annual exhibition which sold and got my first red dot. This gave me the motivation to start painting seriously most evenings and weekends. Sales in local galleries went well, so I then started to produce limited edition prints and Christmas cards from my winter landscapes of snow scenes. My horticultural career and hobby as an artist kept me very busy, as I was traveling all over UK selling paintings and prints.
However in 1992 while I worked as deputy Manager of Landscape and Forestry in Livingston New Town, the Government decided to wind up the New Towns, so I got made redundant. No problem as i now became a full time artist. Living in Scotland there is no shortage of great landscapes to capture on canvas, and in winter when the snow arrived I had plenty snow scenes to add variety. Then my gardening skills gave me plenty of flowers to capture on canvas. In the early years I used oil paints, but later on turned to watercolours and finally into acrylics.
Today I mostly use acrylics as they are fast drying and very forgiving. When one young lady, my Scottish model figure study never quite worked out, she got buried under a carpet of snow as I created a woodland winter landscape on this canvas. Several paintings follow the same path if they just do not impress the viewer.
Many artists find their main topic and continue with variations of their subject, but I find beauty in so many different places that I am forever changing topics.
However as it happens I often end up with one topic and numerous variations of the same. My Cape Gooseberry paintings are now on number 15, and my Scottish model Emily gave me so many sexy poses that I had to do a watercolour project of six different poses to find the best one for a large oil painting called Temptation. Although my gardening skills keep me in a world of brilliant flower borders full of colour, and with my allotment garden we get plenty fresh fruit and vegetables and cut flowers and I get fresh air and plenty exercise. The allotment has also provided numerous ideas for interesting paintings with dilapidated sheds, crooked fences, wild flowers and heaps of interesting garden junk. My neighbor Arthur's plot was full of pots, boxes, pallets, posts, roof tiles and flowering weeds, sorry, poppies. It may have been an allotment garden disaster, but it was an artists dream so I have now completed about ten studies of Arthur's Plot.
As we head into 2024 I see a change in direction for my style as I loosen up and create paintings with impact rather than reality. I will add new images to my blog and I welcome views from others to guide me along this new path.