The Novelist Painting

I have been drawing and painting and taking a general interest in art of all periods and schools from a very young age, and this is because my mother, Dorothy Franks-Cowen, was herself a distinguished artist and teacher of drawing, painting, anatomy and the history of art; she was my first teacher in those disciplines and, since she had been trained at the Royal College of Art, it proved to be a good way to start. Later I studied drawing and painting at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, then at the Collège de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and consequently I may boast that I have worked in the same celebrated atelier where the likes of Soutine and Modigliani and many other great artists of the Ecole de Paris once worked Those experiences were truly inspiring. I paint in oils and in watercolour, and I draw in pencil, in charcoal and in ink. My subjects are portraiture and social scenes, animals, landscape and still-life. My style is figurative and, whilst I hold to the traditional attitude that all compositions should be underpinned by sound drawing, I regard myself as a colourist in the sense that I am interested in expressing emotions by means of special colour combinations. I have exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London, at the Leleu Gallery in Paris, and in galleries in various cities and towns in Britain and in France, and I have sold a lot of paintings and drawings. My great ambition apart from my intention to paint every city of Europe, is to paint a set of murals in a public building or perhaps in a well-known restaurant so, if any of you wishes to commission me to that effect, I should be very interested indeed.