Look Out Painting

I was born in 1958 in Tonbridge, Kent, UK. I have three older brothers, Stephen, Nicholas and Timothy. My father was a lawyer and my mother was an actress. I knew that I wanted to go to art school from the age of 8, as I loved to draw at the kitchen table while my mum was busy. I invented characters and had a vivid imagination, which obliterated the world of maths and latin and greek that my brothers were so immersed in. I loved acting and dressing up too, and listened to my mum's memories of her acting career in the Birmingham Repertory Co. and then as a Star in Battledress in India and Myanmar. My father was busy working long days in London. When I left school I achieved my dream of going to Art School! At first I planned to study Graphic Design, but thought that studying art in its purer form - Fine Art - would be more valuable, and that I might be able to use art commercially later. The need to draw from life and see how artists worked and thought was important to me. I loved learning how to print and make films too. In 1978 my mother died while I was at Corsham. Until then I had been unaware of how much I relied upon her constant love and support. Without her I became a more serious person, and more introspective. I looked into mark making processes, and how to generate content. How to create a significant form. I was interested in the work of Joel Fisher, Alan Green, Howard Hodgkin, Colin Crumplin and Michael Craig-Martin. I didn't understand the work of Peter Kinley. I left Corsham with a First Class Bachelors of Art in Painting. Art was a fairly new subject for being given the status of a degree, so we didn't have a ceremony of graduation. It wasn't really seen as important, because we knew that no certificate can make you a good artist. We were under no illusions that life as an artist would be easy. We knew we would have to find alternative ways to support ourselves. From this moment on we needed to employ lateral thinking. I learned to be a secretary at Pitman's Secretarial College in Holborn. I lived above my dad's law office nearby. My first job was at the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics at the Royal Society of Science in Carlton House Terrace, just off the Mall. I travelled to Japan, the USA and Germany. I visited big art museums, including Documenta 7 in Kassel, in 1982, with Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger among many others. I studied a part time MA at Goldsmith's College of Art from 1983-86.