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"...the sound of the voices - many of them are now so familiar - keep me company in this most lonely of pursuits ..."
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I have been a Radio 4 listener since I was a student. Wherever I have had my studios since then, it has been a constant, a framework against which I have worked. The programming defines my day with The World at One as the pivot on which to hang the rest of my day. I lunch during it and take the dog out afterwards. It is a kind of addiction which I have tried to break by straying to other stations but never for long. Much of the time it is just the sound of the voices - many of them are now so familiar - that keep me company in this most lonely of pursuits as I work on projects from commissioned murals to one-man exhibitions.
As a painter essentially of "place", albeit working from my studio, I do not seek to derive direct imagery from my listening but in the last year, without this listening habit I would not have embarked on two specific groups of paintings.
The first arises from the ghastly unfolding of events around the Iraq war. The whole episode would have paralysed me (how could one paint landscape while this was going on especially in the light of the regular broadcasts about it) but for the continuing schedule of normal programming that somehow enabled me to keep a grip on myself, and work through this. The result was four gouache paintings entitled Baghdad Nights, uncharacteristically surreal, uncharacteristically tight in their construction and execution, uncharacteristically allusive to current events.
The second group are the result of a passion for the Shipping Forecast which first cast its spell over me many years ago. The way an idea takes seed and then takes time organically to develop into something tangible is totally unpredictable. This last year I finally resolved not how to illustrate the Shipping Forecast, but how to use a familiar theme for me - the coast around the British Isles - to create a series of paintings that might visually convey something of the poetic rhythm and allusions contained within the mantra-like works broadcast to mariners twice a day every day by the BBC. I know that this programme has caught the imagination of many writers, photographers and painters; in my case it has caught my imagination both as a painter and as a sailing person who knows what is it to plot a position and anticipate a storm. This has developed into a longer term project than initially intended, in that I am working on covering all 30-odd areas broadcast on specific days over a period of about a year.
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