I have recently spent some time reading about the life of Proust and his great novel A la Recherche and in particular his working methods. At a point in his life after 1900 be purchased a whole load of school exercise books [cahiers] into which he recorded observations, conversations and the elements of what would become places and characters. A pastiche of such elements linked a name to the physical characteristics of a friend or acquaintance to a place and a story, sometimes freely swapping the lives of men and women, to create composite, fictional characters. The places such as Combret and Balbec were also inventions. However, all of this was set against the backdrop of the main themes of his novel, so characters and places were concocted to fit into the overall idea. What struck me was the similiarity of the process to the way I work.

Something I have been thinking about is the time and place where I grew up. 1950s and 1960s England was suffused with the heroes of WW2, the rise of music and fashion to denote a new generation and a feeling of renewal and reinvention. Even with whole swathes of east end London being destroyed, its history and shape remained intact. The streets were where they had always been and beneath them layers of history.

At this point in time, some 70 years later, those streets and those heroes have come together in a series of drawings and paintings I have been calling Pilot because I grew up on stories of Spitfire pilots and the Battle of Britain all of which was reinforced by the films. Quite close to where I grew up was an abandoned airfield, long since turned into a housing estate, where the outlines of the runways and the concrete blocks of the air raid shelters still stood. As children we roamed over the area but by then their significance had already faded.

The pilots were stoic examples of self-sacrifice, forever dressed in flying jacket and life vest, goggles on top of the head and photographed on the left hand side of their planes. They had nick names and moustaches and have become symbols of an idea of what it meant to be British. My drawings are based on grainy photographs but what I want to bring out is the heroic, never-say-die attitude. I read that the most common phrase of pilots about to die was ‘I think I can make it’. But the pilots with their sparkling eyes and optimism are only part of the work. Google gives me aerial views of the parts of London in which I lived and as might have been seen from above by pilots. The two views overlayed, the posed picture beside an aircraft and the streets below, are both symbolic of a time and place which existed, still exists, and yet does not. This idea of memory and history runs through all of my current work.

This is very Proustian. He lived through the bombing of Paris in WW1, admired the heroes, followed battle strategy in the newspapers and walked the streets with indifference to the danger. In spite of numbers of his friends dying at the front, his view of the war was one of an abstracted reality happening over the horizon. He was more concerned about the decadence of the society around him in which he saw the role of the Arts as the only means of salvation but the composite characters who peopled his cityscape both never existed and became a living presence as he layered his version of Paris.

The equivalent of Proust’s cahiers are my note and sketchbooks. I record, interpret and examine continually both as a painter and a writer.  Drawing is the tool I employ as an artist and words as a writer but the process of synthesis I use to explore themes and ideas resembles that used by Proust. Mine is not a direct transcription of the world, as say a landscape painter might employ, or an attempt to get at heart of a subject such as portrait painter might use, but a world synthesised into symbols and open to interpretation by the audience.