Born in 1955 in south Somerset, I have been involved with art circles since the age of 17, when joining my first painting classes. Starting with oils and belonging to a class dealing almost entirely with the local Somerset landscape, I gradually extended my interests to produce work in pastels, acrylics, gouache, coloured pencil and acrylic inks. During a spell in the mid-90's of severe back problems, I began using subject material close to home....the garden. This led on to a steady run of some four years painting floral subjects almost exclusively.

In 1999 I joined a growing number of painters who were putting up personal websites showing their pictures. This eventually led on to the current website in 2001.

My annual production is shared between a few offline group exhibitions, one or two selected online galleries and this website.

Style of Work

My general style, since the late 90's has varied between traditional and more modern images. I also started working on larger canvas panels and exploring the use of acrylic. Flowers offer a wide variety of shape, colour and composition, allowing the creation of bold images for Internet sale and other, representational pictures for local exhibitions.

In mid-year I took a break from commission-work due to other pressures. I also sense the decline in available, disposable income which will not fully show itself until 2011. I have continued to look at smaller work and experiment with different painting surfaces; returning to canvas-board, mdf and paper as canvas will certainly rise in price over the next twelve months. The increase in VAT will not affect the prices that I ask for my paintings, but certainly it will affect the costs of materials.....I intend countering that by producing smaller works and varying the working-surfaces as just described. I have no intentions of allowing any economic crisis to prevent me from painting....I am well-stocked with materials...and that will continue, even if global forces cut the Internet off for several months (which is highly likely)....I shall still be around!

General History:

• 1974... Started art classes, first pictures exhibited and sold the following year;
• 1979... Shared local exhibition with three artists;
• 1980... First successful entries to Royal Bath and West Art Show;
• 1980 onwards... Support of various local exhibitions involved in charity fundraising;
• 1996... Start of flower painting, production and sale of first floral pictures;
• 1999... First website created at Cottagegallery;
• 2000 onwards...creation of second website; reintroduction of more landscape pictures;
• 2001 to 2004...Three Local Best In Show Awards; one for a still-life and two for landscapes; all pastel paintings. (However, I don't make a habit of entering art competitions).
• 2005... Continued establishment of artwork sales online and commission-work. First sales made to buyers in U.S.A
• 2006... Participation in Chicago-based exhibition, with a group of artists; displaying mainly small works no larger than 4 x 3 inches approximately. Further commissions for private buyers, single and multiple-panel florals; further sales made to overseas buyers.
• 2007.....A quieter year, heavily interrupted by family and household needs in the second half. However, a couple of commissions successfully completed during this time. The painting "Calla Curves" appeared as a support image in the book "The Acrylic Flower Painters' A to Z" by Lexi Sundell (Quarto Press).
• 2008....Ongoing, but including membership of several new online galleries.
• 2009....Artist of the Week features on several gallery sites; creation of the co.uk supporting website.
• 2010....Slight merging of functions for both co.uk and dot com websites. Threats from governments to control the Internet reinforce my concerns over keeping up 'Net visibility. On the painting front, despite the recession, I am pleased to be actually selling more work than in 2009. Work focused now in three places; ZeroOneArt, Art2Arts, and Artgallery.co.uk; plus occasional updates in TheArtistStudio and AffordableBritishArt. Another local exhibition award, for pastels.

• 2011....Small reshuffle with online galleries, still with ZeroOneArt, plus TheArtistStudio but due to home pressures early in 2011 decided to suspend Artgallery/AffordableBritishArt membership till a later date. New ACEOs (art cards) were offered on Ebay during the year. Late summer, re-started ArtGallery membership; discontinued the co.uk website but retained domain name. Produced a couple of small videos and articles for free download.

• 2012... in December 2011, a blog was set up, SmallArtUK, to cater for the small-format paintings being produced. The blog will be used as a back-up for the website, just in case of any disasters.