Single Tree 2 Painting

I was born in 1946 in Newcastle upon Tyne. After working as a lawyer with a large firm in the City of London for twenty seven years, I fulfilled my ambition and went to art school for four years. Since graduated I have been painting full time.

I paint images of the accoutrements of businesss life, isolating them within unadorned, matt, abstract grounds. These badges of office: formal suits, ties, shirts and polished shoes, recall my prior career as a solicitor in the City. As signifiers of my former life, my relationship to them is complex, evoking elements of playful irony and reflective nostalgia but also experiences of negotiating professional and corporate hierarchies and of the artifice and constrictions required by the life of the city worker. The whole field of white collar work, and its accessories, goes largely unnoticed by contemporary art. My work addresses the extraordinary ordinariness of this neglected area.
Painted with a sense of precision acquired in my former life, my paintings refer both to the worlds of private meaning as well as to wider issues such as loss of identity and corporate uniformity. I am interested in the gulf between private and shared meaning and intend to evoke, simultaneously, both the sharing and denial of understanding that arises from the use of our private languages.