After leaving college I worked in ceramics, first as an instructor and later as a craft potter producing gas fired stoneware pottery.

I went to Edinburgh College of Art in 1971 for a four year course in Drawing and Painting. During this time my interest in landscape painting was ignited by a trip to the island of Iona off the West Coast of Scotland, and further encouraged by a short stay at Hospitalfield (a large house at Arbroath, Tayside, then jointly owned by the four Scottish art colleges). 

I worked as a musician in the eighties, playing fiddle and metal vest in, what was at the time, Scotland’s only heavy metal cajun band - Deaf Heights, and appeared with Bo Diddley, Mud, The Pogues, King Kurt, The Proclaimers, KD Laing, Charlie Musselwhite and Runrig.

Venues included Barrowland, Olympia, Dingwalls, The Hundred Club, Goldsmiths, Fat Sams, Princes Street Gardens, Cafe Grafitti and the  legendary Mucky Duck in Shotts, Lanarkshire. Featured on BBC’s “The Tube”

For my sins, at various other times I have worked on a farm, in a steelworks, building sites, a warehouse,  hotels, a factory, in several filling stations and in a kilt hire shop.

Thanks to  Marc Marnie - Photographer

In a tent - last century

Pirntaton Hill near Fountainhall

Winter landscape in the Borders

I lived for some time in the Scottish Borders. I became increasingly interested in seeing the sky as the major element in landscape painting. This remains my main motivation for painting.

While I’ve always painted, I started painting as a fulltime occupation in 1988, first in the Scottish Borders, then in the South East of England, before moving back to Scotland in 1997.

I now live and work in a studio which looks out over the River Tay in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee in Scotland. Besides oil rigs I’ve seen otters from the window, dolphins, tall ships, a hovercraft and a Lancaster bomber.

I can’t stand football and I have no interest  in sport, soap opera, religion, or reality TV.

Some other interests are photography, ships, animals, computer graphics, metalworking, woodworking, engines, history, natural history, poetry, sculpture, doing websites.

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