" It makes you think."  A viewer at an exhibition once said of my work. I took it as a compliment. My pictures tell stories so thinking is good. 

From the beginning of my art training in the mid seventies my main interest has been in figurative and particularly narrative and symbolist art. My influences were, in art of course, but not to a lesser degree the comics, film and television and those sixties style graphics I'd grown up with.

Whether I'm working with paint, film or digital drawing I'm interested in images that portray a frozen moment, that stillness through which an underlying meaning is implied or revealed. A moody atmosphere prevails and a sense that something is about to happen. I make pictures to try to understand the world I live in.

I graduated from Leicester Polytechnic in 1980 and I've continued painting ever since. To earn a living I've done anything I can think of to do with art and design: Poster design, workshops, big commercial murals, stage and film backdrops and set painting, sign writing, illustrations, gallery tech and curation and yes, painting and decorating.

I've been living in the Hebridean Isle of Mull for over twenty years, for a lot of that time I worked at An Tobar, the arts centre in Tobermory, as the gallery technician and curator. This has meant that I've been able to work on exhibitions with a lot of really great artists and musicians,   . 

The Isle of Mull is one of the islands of the Inner Hebrides off the West coast of Scotland. It's a stunning looking place with a lot of unique features not least of which is it's cultural energy. 

There's a lot of information about the Island on the internet, much of it about the history of the place, much more about tourism.

The links below are to my wife Sarah Darling's photography websites, these websites give a pretty good impression of the sort of place Mull is and some of the things we get up to.

 

http://www.picturemull.co.uk/

 

https://www.polaroidblipfoto.com/picturemull

 

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