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How did you become what you are today, professionally? It was inevitable that I would do something arty. I did a foundation course on the coast in Hastings and graphics at St. Martins in London. Did you think about how to make a living, at all? Graphic design at its finest is a wonderful occupation. But unless you are exceptionally talented and hard working it can also be quite mundane. Financially the good thing about doing graphics as opposed to fine art at college is that you can always get some sort of a job afterwards, however crap. So I think the choice to do graphics is to be aware of the practicalities of living. Who had an influence on you in terms of what you wanted to do in life? I grew up surrounded by artists and eccentrics. There was an old lady visionary painter called Betty Swanwick who lived a few miles from where I grew up. I used to stay with her in my early teens. She had a pug and a parrot and chain smoked cigars. She introduced me to Gin and Tonic. She had a terrible extended smokers cough which left her incapacitated for minutes. When she started one of these spasms, the parrot used to imitate the sound very realistically, which as an embarrassed teenager made me laugh uncontrollably. Then the pug, also hoarse from cigar smoke and a toothless old age would start its pathetic barking. Me, Betty, the parrot and the pug spent evenings convulsed like this. But what she would also do is look at my work and encourage me to draw from life. She was very old school and hated anything modern or non figurative. There were several artists like her who were a great inspiration, but who also made it very difficult for me to break away from their powerful influence and find my own ‘voice’. I spent all of my time at college and most of my twenties on a mission to find it. |
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