Introduction

Family Background

Welsh working class background

Teacher or the pit

Welsh, English and Australian

Education?

My father, my teacher

Singing in Welsh

The importance of the Welsh background

Art as a vocation

No sense of visual arts

Convalescing uncle

A pair of snow shoes

Painting the snowy landscape

Consider becoming a visual artist

The sheer pleasure of doing painting

Murals for the Post Office bar

Illuminating manuscript writer

A Scottish friend for life

Paris, Gaugin, Madrid and the Prado

Thinking visual arts

Secondary modern school education

Liverpool School of Art

A vague sense of vocation

Ronald McKinzie

I want this to happen

New American painting at the Tate

An expressive tool to show emotion

A powerfull tool to express feeling

Emigration to Australia

The age of anxiety

No future to stay here

Australia, a mistake?

Emigration to South Australia

Looking a bit down

Perfect qualifications to be an Australian

Start of professional life

Adelaide starts to shape vocation

Meeting Kym Bonython

Working for Kym Bonython

Living in the basement

Hanging exhibitions

A fantastic thing

A city of churches and pubs

The cultural hub of Australia

Overwhelmed by Sydney

Max Harris and Mary Martin's bookshop

The first commission

Belonging to the arts

The South Australian School of Art

Studying with people like himself

The first Graphic Art Society

How to be professional

The abstract expressionist route

How to make etchings

The discipline of the practice

Drawing a Coke bottle

A wonderful, banal, useless image

A really good foundation

Return to London

Culture in Australia not on top of agenda

Rough jobs

Friends with Brian Plummer

Meeting great artists

The London years

The transformative power of painting

The explosion of screen printing

Losing the way in painting

A purely intellectual entity

Lack of need for the appearance of objects

The importance of influence

Matisse

The impact of Matisse

The subject of the painting

Colour manipulates everything

I will put in a colour

Colour leads to shape

Feeling through colour

The pallette and meaning

Expressive colour that grows out of the act of painting

Handwriting in painting

Unique sensibility

The decorative quality

The influence of celtic art

Weaving subject amter into a shape

Decoarion, powerful and expressive

The significance of Berlin

Melancholy reinforced by Berlin

Not painting attractive pictures

The studio and the Death Zone

Paying with life for a romantic idea

The pictures take you off someplace else

No references to the trigger

The Instruments for a Solitary Navigator

Titles of abstract paintings

Searching for how to live

A slime trail left by the snail

The artifacts left behind

Painting as a trace of life

Living a life rooted in culture

Running out of steam

Finish knowing nothing

Mark making

Sculpture is implicit from the paintings

Sculptures imply deep space

Sense of the abstractness with the illusion of space

I don't want to be read in a conventional way

An abstract space

an endless maze of questions with no answers

avishing colour, jouissance

Ravished by colour

Ravishing and decoration

The abstractness of music

Reading and music

Baroque music reflected in work

Baroque abstraction

Baroque becomes the subject matter

Approaching the practice

The idea of discipline

Without discipline, can not make good art

How do I do it and how do I shape it?

Searching for a more perfect form of image

Settling for shortcuts in contemporary times

Got to keep working

All art is errotic

Too old to have a future

Turning back to discipline

Reclaiming the past for the future

An old painter's attitude

Thank you

Credits