Born in Wales in 1939. Student at Cardiff College of Art (N.D.D./A.T.D. 1958-1962. Post-Graduate Scholarship student under Maurice de Sausmarez at Byam Shaw School of Art, London 1962-63. 1964-2009: Visiting Lecturer at various art schools including Royal College of Art, St Albans School of Art, Farnham School of Art, Royal Academy School & Byam Shaw School of Art (Senior Tutor & Head of Painting. Also taught summer courses at the Verrocchio Art Centre in Tuscany, Italy.

Exhibited widely in one-man & mixed exhibitions including Aberystwyth Art Centre, Wales, House Gallery and Concourse Gallery, London, Art Space Gallery, Aberdeen, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Hayward Gallery, The British Art Show, London Group, Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions & Camden Arts Centre, John Moores Liverpool Exhibitions.

Work is held in many private and public collections including The Arts Council of Great Britain, Government Art Collection, Aberystwyth Art Centre, Rugby Museum & Art Gallery, National Museum of Wales and the National Museum and Galleries on Merseyside.

Awards: Jubilee Scholarship, GLAA Visual Arts Award, Jerwood Drawing Prize, The Lorne Award.

My Paintings are figurative paintings, the imagery personal and imaginatively realised; they concern the present though the past is inevitably there too. Although my painting territory is clearly mapped out I can never see the whole painting at the start – it has to grow, find its rhythm and pace, find itself*. My work explores the subject of journeys, rite and myth which has involved using highly theatrical imagery and a degree of distortion to emphasize the dramatic and declamatory nature of the narratives**. Matthew Collings likened the earlier paintings to “humorous puppet shows – Mr Punch meets Molloy”. In time, however, I came to feel confined by the overwhelming greyness and suppressed palette where fragmented figures became embedded and sometimes trapped in the narrow grey space (gallery 4). Many years and transformations later colour, as a symbolic, expressive and poetic force, became a decisive element, revealing and defining the territory in a different, more luminous light, at the same time transforming the whole experience of painting.

My practice is sustained and enlarged by what I continue to absorb from looking at and learning from other paintings. There are artists who remain necessary company throughout life; Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua is like that, a well that never dries up. These paintings have a humanity and imaginative purpose that always thrill and move, creating the urgent and abiding need to paint the human story, triumphant, tragic and comic. In particular, the line that reaches down through time from Giotto to Carra, Sironi and Cucchi has been important in inspiring a sense of purpose and direction, an enduring experience that holds true to the present day where Picasso continues to cast a long shadow as also do Matisse, Beckmann & Guston.