the colour wheel 65-1 Painting

I have been making art for close over 35 years, originally working in screen print, producing big, bold, colourful cartoons on perspex/plexiglass and later exploring themes related to religion, alchemy, astrology and nature. I have also worked throughout my life as a designer and illustrator, mainly in the field of environmental interpretation. Although I have had no formal training in the fine arts, I collaborated for a period in the 1980s with the influential Scottish painter and art lecturer James Cumming RSA, to produce a series of screen prints based on his work. He was kind enough to comment at the time that he thought I had as good an eye for colour as anyone he ever knew. In recent years, I have been experimenting with new media and giclee printing, producing monotype abstracts of varying degrees of complexity. My fascination is the interplay of colour and pattern and natural geometry - the kind of subtle forms that can be discovered in a landscape, the spread of wildflowers in a meadow, cloud formations in the sky or the imagined pictures seen in the flames of an open fire. I like to believe that working with these shapes and patterns exercises both hemispheres of my brain in equal measure. I am also interested in exploring man's relationship with the heavens and there is a strong cosmological/astrological undertone to many of my works. I love to create and have the good fortune to be quite prolific and so enjoy working in a medium which allows me to work quickly, without the constraints imposed by the practicalities of more traditional methods. It also allows me to produce original art which is very affordable.