Johan Asherton is a musician and songwriter from Paris, with a really deep bass-baritone voice. We became friends and pen-pals after he admired my book about Kevin Ayers. I’ve photographed Johan and his musician friends a number of times but I always wanted to portray him in a pencil or painted portrait too. Et voila! [...]
This portrait was based on sketches and photos taken in a cornfield in Suffolk. The early evening light played beautifully across Kevin’s pale Celtic skin and jet black hair…
When one of my A-Level Art students announced she was going to do a project about tattoos I realised that I knew the perfect model for some drawing from observation! Ray was “a friend of a friend”, tall, dark-haired, star sign Sagittarius (naturally) and lead singer of a local rock band in Aylesbury. He was [...]
Mr and Mrs Dhura’s son, Amondeep, commissioned me to make this double portrait as a thank you present for his parents on the occasion of his marriage. I didn’t meet Mr and Mrs Dhura until the wedding day so I worked from a photograph supplied by Amondeep, a Science teacher in a nearby school. I [...]
I saw Marillion in concert a few times during the 1980s; at Hammersmith Odeon, Glastonbury Festival and at St. Andrew’s Hall in Norwich, just around the corner from the Norwich School of Art building. I took my Olympus OM1 SLR camera with me to the gig and took a series of photos from quite close [...]
After spending days and weeks in the Life Room at Norwich School of Art producing “academic” nudes, Stephen and I decided we would prefer to paint some of our friends (with clothes on!). So we took it in turns to pose for each other in the mornings. Stephen was one of the youngest and most [...]
I painted this self-portrait for a homework assignment during my A-level Art course at Lowlands Sixth Form College, Harrow. The brief was to use an unusual coloured light source to create an interesting atmosphere. One of the challenges was working in a darkened room, with a fairly dim red light bulb and trying to guess [...]