Over the years I have made hundreds of images from life, that is to say, from nude models, women and men. I have done some of people wearing clothes, not so many. When I was twenty I spent a year at Liverpool Art College, where we had life drawing classes several times a week, often supervised by a painter called Sam Walsh, who instructed us in the arcane discipline of measuring with a pencil, after the fashion of William Coldstream, Euan Uglow et al. Whilst I was very happy to have learned this very formal technique and it certainly gave me greater confidence in my own drawing, finally, I began to see it as a confining convention.
I produced hundreds of drawings that year: gritty uncompromising stuff, often done with a rubber through graphite scribble, to avoid the taint of making a mark, on occasion working entirely through the drawing paper and having to patch it from the back. This seemed very authentic to me at the time.Since then, I have attended many life drawing sessions, and for several years I taught life drawing to students and adults.
A humane pursuit, I have always thought, a contemplative thing.
But for me, there is something else too. I have made many drawings of women which are not formal at all, rather they are celebrations or attempts to record feeling, desire. These drawings are often based on photographs I have taken.
It has been said that art is the celebration of loss.
Linda and I have been partners for more than twenty years and I have made scores of drawings of her, and paintings. It is a part of what I do. Most of the images here are of her.