Biography

Happily married, lives in Chatham, artist, poet, story-teller and mythographer

1.8.53 Born in Maidstone, Kent. His father was a shepherd and farm worker.
1964-68 Westborough Secondary Modern School. No qualifications.
1968-75 Unloading trucks in Pricerites supermarket warehouse, Maidstone
1975-76 Unloading trucks in Cheeseman department store, Maidstone
1976 Nervous breakdown. Attempted suicide. Three months in Crossfield psychiatric ward (Oakwood Hospital), West Malling
1977-78 Medway College of Art and Design, Foundation Art
1979 Member and namer of The Medway Poets
1978-82 CSSD Porter, West Kent General Hospital
1982- Full-time artist with forays into tomato picking, a yoghurt factory and cleaning floors in Tesco. Writer-in-Residence, Brighton Festival.
1999 Founder member of The Stuckists
2001- Teaching mythology course at Kent Children's University
2004 Featured artist, The Stuckists Punk Victorian, Walker Art Gallery, for the Liverpool Biennial
2006 Go West show, Spectrum London

Six books of poems and three of short stories; five reading tours of USA and one of Nicaragua. Movie buff . Solo show at Rochester International Photography Festival. Included in World Fantasy Award winner The Green Man (Viking Press), Member of School for Prophets, liberation theology.

Working method

"I taught myself to paint. I have been influence by Anna Maria Pacheco, Paula Rego and Marc Chagall, as well as comic books and movies. My work is not about the technique, but what's underneath it. That's not to say I want to paint bad pictures. I keep drawing or painting the image - maybe even seventy or eighty times - until it's the way I want it."

"God Is an Atheist - She Doesn't Believe in Me" painting

"I had this move through Christianity and Judaism towards something else - I'm not quite sure what yet. The woman represents both my idea of holiness and the feminine part of myself, which is my link to the Great Mystery - that otherness that you sense behind things but you don't know what it is. I used to call it God, but now that seems a very lame word. In old paintings the dog would have represented fidelity, but it could also be an anagram of God or a trickster figure who illuminates the human shadow (the buried part of us). None of these things are separate: they only appear separate. My paintings are like a magic mirror in fairy stories. I hold it up to try to see my true likeness. Sometimes it takes me years to work out what the symbols mean. That's why I do them - to try and find out something.

Text based on The Stuckists Punk Victorian book (National Museums Liverpool)