About

Since graduating with an MFA in 1974 I developed a career in art education teaching for thirty-five years in a number of art schools mainly in the North West. I taught across all levels from Foundation through to Masters level including a period as Course Leader for Visual Arts at Salford University and as Programme Leader for Fine Art in Manchester School of Art. I retired in 2009 as Director of Studies in Art and Media, Manchester School of Art. During this time I also acted as an external examiner/adviser for a number of Fine Art programmes including Wolverhampton, Coventry, Birmingham, Newcastle and Sheffield.

Since the mid 1970s I have maintained an expansive personal practice that has led to a number of group and solo shows. The details of the most significant exhibitions are included in the Section Introductions which connect particular works or bodies of work to different forms of presentation spaces. I have also collaborated with a number of artists on exhibition/research projects in particular Anne Grebby around 2000 and then Karen Lyons and Paul Haywood a few years later.

I was also involved in more formal research projects including an unfinished PhD during the 1990s Painting and Narrative Structure: A study of the relationships between the making of paintings and the concept of narrativity and the curation of the exhibition project Reflective Stories – Using sketchbooks and journals in art, design and related subjects in 2008.
Between 2002 and 2005 I completed a Senior Learning and Teaching Fellowship in the Faculty of Art and Design at Manchester mainly exploring connections between the concepts of ‘creative practitioner’ and ‘academic practitioner’.

Throughout this period I have produced a number of written texts for fine art and academic publications, conference papers and staff development programmes. These have included exhibition catalogue introductions for Simon Lewis, Karen Lyons, Val Close and essays for Departure Lounge – recent paintings by Maggie Ayliffe, Brendan Fletcher, Ben Cook, Rick Copsey, John Rimmer and Rebecca Sitar (1999) and ‘Some observations on recent abstract painting in Manchester’ for Beyond the Endgame: Abstract Painting in Manchester (2003). Academic publications have included Towards an Interdisciplinarity within Fine Art Education (1994), Creative Reflection (2005), Narrativity and Critical Reflection (2006), a contribution to The student experience in art and design higher education – drivers for change (published 2008) and ‘From a (Greater) Distance’ presentation in THEN and NOW National Association for Fine Art Education Symposium, (2014).

More recently two essays based on the Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation project have been published one in ‘Red Pepper’ (2015) and in ‘North West Labour Review’ (2016).

Indicative examples of these texts can be found in the Writings Archive.