Wessex/Dorset has played a huge part of both my life and my work. Wessex as much in a way as we had to drive through Wessex to get to the West Country for our school holidays as a kid. The first destination was a beach chalet on Branscombe Beach, East Devon. Then Mum and Dad bought a ramshackle basement of a regency house at Bellair, Charmouth for £600 in 1963.

I have very fond memories of this time, the smells of the leather seats of our Black Morris Minor Traveller, the mix of camping gaz, creosote and sea air from the chalet and the musky smell of damp and wood smoke in the basement at The Garden Flat, Bellair. These where things that marked a difference from my suburban other home life.

I left Epsom School of Art and Design in 1982, out into a world, I could of, should of headed for the big bad city but instead ran to the hills of West Dorset to be a landscape painter. Fresh with all the youthful bits and stuff from college. That post college time in Dorset was such an important time, I discovered so much and set so many things in place just by trying to carry on with it. Things that still resonate today. It was like a foundation of how to be an artist outside of and beyond the art world. It really was me and the landscape, the big it, the other, the beyond. I had a beach hut I worked from and studied the changing light of west bay, then I had my first studio, complete with roof light on St Michaels trading Estate, an old master bedroom in a Georgian Rectory, an Open Studio in West Bay, an attic garrett in deep rural Powerstock, and finally a garden shed back in Bellair, Charmouth. A full kind of circle.

This was a period of about 9 years and I supported myself through part time jobs and a bit of teaching. It was towards the end of this period that I began to sell my work. Dorset is very beautiful, maybe too beautiful, too soporific. The pull of the west beckoned. I met my life partner and future wife Sally Crabtree, and we went off on an adventure, and we are still on that adventure. So Wessex, Dorset was the kind of melting pot of both good and bad worldly things, but work through, behind and above all this carried on. The gaze is as much a find of direction as it is a daydream.