CHILDHOOD

“I don’t remember pictures in my parents home.  No doubt there were some, but they obviously made no impact on me.  I was told that I had an aunt that did water colours, but I never saw her work.  My only living sibling, Steven, was born when I was thirteen, so much of my childhood was an only child.  Growing up I had two choices; to find myself at the receiving end of a soft ball thrown at my face or to retreat into a personal world of fantasy.  Today I am not known as a softball player.

I collected various bones from the wild life of the area – mostly lizards, rats and a few snakes – which I took to the laboratory under the floor of our house.  In the privacy of my laboratory, inspired by medical books my father had in the house, I drew these bones as best I could.  Everything, including the early sexual urges of adolescence, were expressed through these attempts at drawing.  These secreat drawings, no doubt, remain in the Jungle between Montrose and Hawkins Hill in the tins in which they’d been buried.  I had found a use for art even before I knew what it was.

One Christmas I received nearly a dozen paint-by-numbers kits.  I was eight with a serious interest in art.  I remember my mother helping me take all the paint out of the capsules and mixing the colours so that I could paint my own “original”.