Every artist passes through stages in their career which can be determined by medium, influence or event/location. I am no different. However, what is interesting to me is not stages but beginnings. I can trace the origins of both specific ideas and stylistic tendencies to those formative teenage years when I was trying to make sense of the world and knew little or nothing about art.

I grew up in a so-called new town in the UK. There were a number of these where an existing country village within spitting distance of London was redesigned to accommodate the disenfranchised of a bombed out East End. Terraced housing, factories, expanses of concrete with the odd artificial garden and a shopping centre expanded the village and sprawled out into the countryside. There was an artificiality to it all that always felt uncomfortable such as a piece of nature trapped in spaces between buildings replete with roadside brambles, blackberries and other wild fruits which refused to be tamed. That mix of man-made rectilinearity, the repetitive forms of terraced housing and the trapped linear patterns of nature have recurred in my paintings endlessly with flattened areas of paint alongside drawn elements. While art played no part in the cultural landscape of this new town, I do recall seeing a suite of paintings in a temporary gallery space by a local artist who scraped lines into wet paint to approximate the wild grasses growing all around us. That has stuck with me.

Venturing into London as an art student reinforced that feeling of imposed order. Here was a much more ancient example of bits of nature trapped between human habitation. It wasn’t just the  open space of Hyde Park after the compression of bodies in the underground but the three years I spent staring into the fenced garden of damp trees opposite my bedsit in Earls Court. The garden was locked and only available to certain property owners, but the blackened trees stood tall and still through rain and snow with a narrow road running around its edge creating an enclosure, although it was more of a parking area than a thoroughfare with cars seeming never to move. I was never able to enter despite of my three years as a temporary resident. Time after time I have subconsciously returned to the square grid as a structure with wilder, linear elements as a contrast.

Those curlicued lines of my drawing style have an origin in the same era. The preferred and enforced written style of my school years was italic. There was an ink pot located in every desk top and a square nib to be mastered. There was even an ink monitor charged with filling the pots. When the biro took its place there was an outcry from education traditionalists who put great store in the beauty of handwriting beyond its ability to communicate, some of whom carried a knuckle-rapping ruler to reinforce that arcane sense of order. I have no doubt that some saw the downfall of society with that rapid transition from pen and ink, but that biro had a profound effect on me. At once my letter shapes and interconnecting lines became more fluid and flamboyant to the extent of making my handwriting all but illegible. Six or more decades later and sculptures that resemble drawn lines in space recur.

Perhaps the most profound of these early influences came not from visual stimuli but a certain sense of alienation. I never felt that I belonged in nature or in fact, anywhere. City and country were equally threatening. Buses and trains, essentially mobile boxes, were refuges and perhaps it was my natural tendency towards introversion that triggered a sense of enclosure. When I see the work of someone like a Phyllida Barlow with an installation endlessly taking over a gallery space there is a distinct feeling of amazement because what has characterised my art from the outset has been the self-enclosed limiting factor of the edge of a canvas or sculpture with a definitive outline.

Perhaps I am applying a selective logic or at least, a selective memory. I am as guilty as anyone of forgetting the past or not remembering even what I was doing a week ago, but I am also conscious of having created a personal myth to account for my life where fact and fiction blur into each other. Should it ever occur that a biographer is tempted to unravel my life in the search for artistic influences, there will be little to find and increasingly no one left alive to talk to so the existing work may be the only guide. Good luck with that.