Welcome to my website, in which I have a Gallery of framed Fine Art works and brief Biography. In

the next year or two, this website will be considerably added to, and advance to include promotion of a publishing project, inspired by  Britain’s National Cartoonstrip Weekly, EAGLE . The

most remarkable achievement of the EAGLE was to attract a record one-million readership by avoiding material guaranteed to provide profit from its popularity at the time!  And the EAGLE even aspired adventurously to include pages of educational comicstrip, leading eventually to the EAGLE SCIENCE EXHIBITIONS at Olympia in London!  So my overall theme throughout will be to promote the vision of ‘an EAGLE  for our time’, merging ART’n’SCIENCE  into a Green and ‘Gaian’ FUTURISM!

Britain was of course the greatest maritime empire in history. So, the sea will be one of my subjects. My mother’s father was Harbour Master of Elie in Fifeshire, and a classic ‘Old Man of The Sea’!  I have fond memory of boyhood days on Scotland’s coast, and also that of Southern England through to Dorset and The West Country. The sea is a metaphor for so much that is otherwise difficult to understand in philosophy and spiritual life. This leads logically to the sciences of our time, lighting the way ahead in an ever-more challenging time for the very survival of our human species!  Water is basic to life!! Wherever it is later found to exist in the seemingly lifeless desolation of infinity, there will certainly be life, or the certainty of it with the passage of time. It is thought that when the atmosphere of planet MARS is warmed by terraforming, water will be released from beneath its desert-red world. And the icy-looking surface of Jupiter’s moon EUROPA  may hide a planetary waterworld!

For me, the post-war 1950s were not the bleak and grey years they have so many times been portrayed as!! But then.....I wasn’t living in a town or city!  Even Beckenham, London, where I was born, was more a rural scene in those days!  The V2 rocket assault on London meant that I was one of many thousands of infants to leave London for regions unaffected by the war. I was especially fortunate, in that my parents came with me to WALES. My father was a British Railways signalman, and easily found a job in Flintshire. In 1949, my parents moved to Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, into a gorgeous house overlooking a barleyfield at the top of Victoria Avenue. Occasionally, the arcadian peace was interrupted by ground-shaking roar of USAF thunderjets at distant Manston Airfield, keeping engines warmed up for nuclear war against Russia!  Then, in April 1950, the EAGLE (Britain’s National Cartoonstrip Weekly) fell through the letterbox one Friday morning!  THUS the course of my life was SET!!  The extraordinary genius Frank Hampson, illustrator and creator of Award-Winning DAN DARE, PILOT OF THE FUTURE, had mesmerised me with imaginative scenarios of space travel and visionary futurism! And Hampson’s science-fiction vision was traditionally very BRITISH, owing naught to ‘superheros’ that overcame the forces of evil with magic and muscles!  After the 11-plus Exam, which paid no heed to high marks in English Language and Art, I was to leave St. Saviours Primary School and my ‘Jennings’ days, to attend King Ethelbert School, Birchington (see photo to the left). Bred as I was by a spiritual consciousness of this beautiful planet, from so much of my boyhood living in rural Britain, I still retain this, as a ‘filter’ through which I make judgements on matters mind, heart and soul. Later, after my COLLEGE OF HERALDS apprenticeship, I would take a tied cottage on Leeds Castle Estate, Kent, to train as a Woodman, and thereby come logically to landscape-painting Fine Art.

Estate

This painting, entitled ‘BOYHOOD’, is my seminal work. Paintings on this theme, portraying a rural Britain now sadly being lost to us all with urban sprawl, will follow on this website later, in a gallery of thumbnails for art dealers and publishers to scroll and view. Why do I emphasise a rural Britain that is passing away inexorably each year? The answer to that question is central to my pessimism concerning a rampantly mercantile modernity, promoting and marketing nomadic cosmopolitan ‘lifestyle’, and the worldly bourgeois values so spiritually worthless and warned of by Christ!!  WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT YOU IF YOU GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD AND LOSE YOUR SOUL?  Never was a comment about human frailty of mind so apt as in today’s ‘rat-race’ after VE Day 1945!!  Perhaps an ‘illustration’ of this is required at this point in my discourse!  It may seem incredible to many that the fate of a field, in a village, could cause a bitter dispute!!  But it’s significant for us all in matters of the soul!  The village was GEORGEHAM, North Devon, where the writer of Tarka The Otter, Henry Williamson, once lived.  Christ would have been incredulous, if He had graced the village with his presence, to learn that Church Commissioners were willing to sell the field for an estimated £300,000 at the time, for a ‘developer’ to build houses on it !! Even a Car Park was in prospect !!  For those in the village wishing to retain  commanding views across the field to St. George’s Church, the very notion of housing and a car park on the field was somewhat akin to vandalism of a kind we normally associate with anti-social behaviour orders! And indeed, this interminable demand for housing of increasing population is at the very core of all that is evil in our time, regarding planetary climate-change catastrophe just a generation away now!  Professor James Lovelock, author of THE REVENGE OF GAIA, has stated that ‘we require a sustained retreat from the mess we’re in’!!  It is of course not the existence of machines and technology which is the problem! The ingenuities of SCIENCE will be never-ending! Motorways become congested because there are too many people, not because there are too many cars!  As all scientists know by now, the end of civilisation as we know it is inevitable if we do not reduce birthrate by a vigorously enforced population policy worldwide!  That is where later my magazine promotion comes IN !