My mother often said that I was born with a brush in my hand. This gave me a huge sense of pride as I had assumed she believed I had shown a precocious talent for art as a child. I later discovered that unable to reach the hospital in time after her waters had broken, she had enlisted the help of a passing road sweeper to deliver me.
My father aspired to be a great inventor, and I was brought up surrounded by weird, often badly made (and consequently badly behaved) contraptions. These included a suction-powered ear wax remover (unfortunately created 2000 years too late for the Egyptian Embalming brain-extraction market), an untamable dog-washing machine and a self-flushing chamber pot - don't ask!
My parents were passionate about green living and self-sufficiency years before it became fashionable in the mid '70s; a lifestyle sent up by the comic antics of Tom and Barbara in The Good Life. We kept chickens, grew all of our own vegetables, and moved the fuel for our woodburner (piled at the bottom of our garden) in a homemade log-lifter powered by our poo. Dad worked as a garden designer and Mum ran the house.
I suppose our way of life could not be called anything other than bohemian. We all loved making art: Mum would recreate Jackson Pollock's spot paintings in cross stitch, Dad would be at the piano playing jazz in a style that made Thelonious Monk look conventional, while I would be found on the carpet hunched over my sketch pad drawing everything.
The misery of the miners' strike, Three-Day-Week and power cuts passed my family by as we had our own electricity generator, did not have a television in the house until the '80s and never read newspapers. We lived in a hippy bubble of our own making and we were happy.
My mother and father made the decision to home school me as they were convinced that the entire education system was being run by a secret society of lizard people whose sole objective was to suck out every last drop of joy and wonder from the brains of infants and then refill their empty vessels with a toxic cocktail of logic, cynicism and respectability. Unfortunately this rather closeted upbringing meant that I (an only child with few friends my own age) had no real knowledge of the wider world, let alone the institutional Art world. For years I puzzled over why so many of my fellow artists seemed to be into '70s Glam Rock as they kept mentioning 'The Slade'. I never really questioned their use of the definite article, thinking it was a cool football speak type affectation, as in 'The Arsenal'. During idle moments I imagine being taught Art by Noddy Holder. "Mama Weer All Cubists Now!" he would holla at paint-stripping volume whilst hurling me a bag of square mirrors to glue onto a top hat.
Today I mainly paint portraits in acrylics; a very versatile medium - a bit like my late aunt Flora who not only communed with the dead but had a talent for growing supersized lettuces to feed her psychic slugs.
Most days you will find me in my studio based in The Nut & Bolthole, the large town house which I grew up in and inherited from my parents after their
untimely deaths, the full story of which you can read if you click the squirrel below. I also have a madman named Alistair living in the loft. You can find
out about my interesting relationship with him in Cries From the Attic.
