Artistically, I began some 50 years ago with photography while studying Town and Country Planning. I have been clicking away ever since. I now have an archive of perhaps 10,000 images. About 15 years ago, I began to experiment with manipulating some of these photographs in the computer. I was keen to create new images that could not exist in any other way. Then in 2008, after a chance visit to a print studio where I saw prints by Howard Hodgkin and Gillian Ayres in production. I was hooked and within days I had enrolled on a course. I’m still learning and still experimenting.
A constant element in all my work is the idea of palimpsest or layering. This probably comes through from my original work as a planner, where I had a long-standing interest in how towns and cities grew over time and how traces of that history could be found in the urban landscape. I’m also interested in neolithic art, represented in part by places like Stonehenge or the standing stones at Carnac in Brittany, but also in less dramatic forms, like cave paintings and rock carvings.
I frequently combine different print media in one image. My screen print “Tree of Life” for example, uses manipulated photographs as the basis for a series of screen print stencils, building the image up in layers. Other work uses multiple collagraph plates. The image is built up in thin glazes of ink, often over part of the plate. Some variations of the image have required ten or more impressions. I have also printed digitally over screen prints, digitally manipulated drawings and sketches and used these to make stencils for screen printing over monoprints and, used digital images to make etched plates in a process called solar etching.
Because of this, each image in an edition will show variations in colour and configuration, sometimes obviously so, but often in more subtle ways. Any editions will normally be quite small for this reason. I prefer to explore the variations possible than forced consistency, and of late have concentrated on monotype and monoprint.
