I was born in India in 1945 to Portuguese-British parents and educated in both India and England. The Portuguese side were indigo planters and the British were army. My upbringing gave me more than a formal education; it also gave me a broad cultural one, largely thanks to my parents.

My Mother was a conservationist long before the term became fashionable. My Father, was a man of boundless energy, enthusiasm and curiosity, and he influenced me enormously. He encouraged me to discover and follow my own interests. His advice was simple: do something you enjoy, be curious, and work hard at whatever you choose. He lived by those words. At various times he played in a dance band, edited a magazine, wrote, illustrated, and drew political cartoons - always working hard and clearly enjoying life.

Through him I discovered Beethoven, Jelly Roll Morton and the blues, Renaissance painting, European poster art and illustrators like Ludwig Hohlwein, Classic novels by Charles Dickens, comics like Superman and P. G. Wodehouse. There was never any hierarchy between “high” and “low” culture in our house - everything mattered. That easy mix of popular culture and serious ideas has shaped my work ever since.

When we arrived in England in 1945, we went to the local school and then onto a Technical School, where at 13 you could make a choice of your main subject - and then art classes took up 25% of my time! At 16, I started a Foundation year at Walthamstow School of Art, and went on to gain a First Class Honours Diploma from the London School of Printing. There I encountered the radical art movements of the twentieth century. One tutor, Georg Adam - who had trained at the Bauhaus - opened my eyes to a completely different way of thinking about art and design. He also introduced us to the anarchic spirit of Dada and artists such as George Grosz, Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch. Around the same time I discovered American Abstract Expressionism, whose raw, uncompromising energy felt brutally honest and perfectly of its moment. Another tutor was Ruskin Spear, who was a great painter to meet, but really didn’t say much in the life drawing evening classes.  The painting tutor, Gerrard de Rose, kept telling us to “Paint the truth, paint the truth.”. Such simple and demanding advice.

I was offered a place at the Royal College but after two years of National Service in the army, I was ready to get on with life. So I turned the offer down. My skills in graphics, illustration and typography led me into advertising - and the world of “Mad Men” beckoned. The jump from art school freedom to commercial creativity was  a challenge, but I learned a huge amount about printmaking, typography, illustration, photography and generating ideas.

In the evenings I often escaped to my private world of painting. Large oil abstract works on board - paintings that, as I later put it, “came out of nowhere and went to the same place.” I didn’t fully understand that I was doing was what I had learned at Art School. Bizarre-  I believed the shapes I was painting were huge Sentinels, guarding the human race. But it was the 60s!  Everything was positive. We didn’t need guarding, so I burned most of them ten years later.  Nearly 40 years later, I found the felt pen drawing of some of that work, in a large folder which I developed into my Guardian series of work which is in the Exhibition.

In 1968 I was head-hunted and went with my family to Germany, where I spent four years working at Interpublic and later in the main McCann advertising agency. Eventually working there as a freelance art director with a German writer, Ottie Severin, who had headed up the American agency Leo Burnetts.

In the 1980s I first  began learning to work with computers using software programmes such as Photoshop and Illustrator.  Back in England I co-founded the agency Yellowhammer with colleagues and moved into new product development for international companies such as Shell, Tate & Lyle and Procter & Gamble.

In the early 1990s I decided it was time to devote myself fully to art, and I began exhibiting my work that I had been doing. My influences ranged widely - I admire the audacity of Pablo Picasso, the colour and intelligence of David Hockney, and of course the radical rethinking of art sparked by Marcel Duchamp. I’m also a great admirer of artists such as Philip Guston, Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, who had such a spiritual and mesmerising effect on me.  I think it was in the early 1960s that I remember standing in a large room in the Tate, as it was known years ago, looking at his work in absolute awe. 

The new to me, Liquitex acrylic paint was another influence, the colours were just amazing, easy to apply and use with water, so, so bright, they jumped off the paper like the colours on my computer.

But perhaps the most useful advice I ever heard came from Andy Warhol, “When I have finished an image, while others are deciding whether it is good or bad, I get on with the next.”

For me, that captures it perfectly: trust yourself.

Read my Profile in an article written by Mike Sims and published in Printmaking Today. Printmaking Today, Spring 2018

Member of the Royal Watercolour Society

Member of the Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers (RE)

Hon Member of Ochre Print Studio

Exhibitions

A Selection

2020s

Bankside Gallery London RWS and RE shows

Axel Art, Bath

Adam’s Gallery Reigate

Forartssake, Ealing

LOPF, London

2010s

Royal Academy Summer Shows, London.

RWS and RE shows, Bankside Gallery, London

Ulsan Biennale, South Korea

Forartssake, Ealing.

Axel Art, Bath

Sino-UK Art Exchange, Bankside Gallery

Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Australia

Globe Theatre, London

The London Print Fair, RA

Trélazé, France

Group of Ten, Bankside Gallery, London

The Harris Museum, Preston

10 years of the Regional Print Centre, Wrexham

Bite, Mall Galleries, London

Coombe Gallery, Devon

Turner & Thom, Eton

2000s

RE shows, Bankside Gallery, London

Impress ’09, Printmaking Festival, Stroud

Wrexham Print Internationals, Wrexham

Glasgow Print Gallery, Glasgow

Pump Gallery Dorking

Small Print/Big Impression, Leicester

International Triennial Print Exhibition, Prague

On-Line Gallery, Southampton

Medici Gallery London

Workplace Art, London

Gallery One, Barnes

Beatrice Royal, Southampton

Workplace Art, London

Mark Jason Fine Art. London

Gallery on the Green, London

Klim, New York Expo and Toronto

Beatrice Royal, Southampton

Gallery on the Green, London

Parkview Fine Paintings, Bristol

1990s

Royal Academy Summer Shows, London

Medici Gallery, London

Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow

Beatrice Royal, Southampton

Fairfax Gallery, Tunbridge Wells

Lucy Simmonds, Hong Kong and LA Expo

Parkview Fine Paintings, Bristol

On-line Gallery, Southampton

The Original Print Gallery, Dublin

Lucy Simmonds, Hong Kong and LA Expo

Images 21 Tour of the UK

John Davies Fine Paintings, Stow-on-the-Wold

Kertesz Gallery, San Francisco

Wyckham Gallery, Stockbridge

Nancy Smillie, Glasgow

Prizes

The Trevor Frankland Award, RWS Show, Bankside Gallery 2020

RWS Exhibitions Prize, RWS Open Competition 2017

Sentinel Gallery Exhibitions Prize, RWS Open Competition 2017

RWS Patron’s Prize, RWS Open Competition. 2015

Centre for Fine Art Print Research UWE, RE Annual. 2008

The Hector Purchase Prize, RE Annual. 2008

The John Purcell Prize, Wrexham Print Bienalle, 2007

 

Collections

RE Diploma Collection 

Royal Watercolour Society

Bank of England, London

Guildford Borough Council

Jiangsu Art Museum, China

 

Selected Commissions

Felix Rosenstiel’s

London Contemporary Art

Greek Island Holidays

Stephen Bull Restaurant

Marks and Spencer

Whittards of Chelsea

Waitrose

Starbucks

Private commissions