It wasn't until I was about 15 that I took any notice of art, and even then I don't think I thought of it as Art, with a capital A. I found myself enjoying what I now know, but didn't then, were Impressionist paintings. I was taken to the Tate and was entranced by the atmospheric world of late nineteenth century French riverside scenes. Paintings by Monet I suppose they would have been, Sisley and Pisarro. They conjured up an exotically sunlit world which was mysteriously different from the glum black and white of English post-war austerity.

I don't think I paid much attention to the painting as such, and it never occurred to me that I might have a go at doing it. I was too much involved in messing around with chemistry and dissecting earthworms and frogs. The odd thing is that my father did draw and paint, and had done so, rather skilfully, since he was a boy. And he managed to do all that as a doctor. Still, I wasn't tempted to emulate him and it wasn't until some years later that I became consciously interested in art and began to visit galleries regularly.

But when I was at Cambridge I got to know several art historians - people like Francis Haskell and Michael Jaffe - and as a result of our frequent meetings, my attention was drawn to painting as an art and to the interesting problems of representation. Even so, I was never tempted to try my hand and although I'd become quite knowledgeable by the time I came down from Cambridge, I was too busy learning to become a doctor to do anything more than visit museums from time to time. So I can't say what it was that made me start doing it... i.e. making things. But it may have been the gift of a Pentax camera when I was in New York in the early sixties which set me off in the direction I've now taken.

Over the years I became more and more interested in snapping abstract arrangements and, without thinking I might do anything with them, I compiled album after album of these non-scenic pictures. But one thing led to another and in recent years I've been making things out of collected odds and ends. Assemblage you might call them. And I have to admit it's become an obsession by now. So it's a pleasure to be on a panel which allows me to see how many people are working away at drawing, painting, etching and sculpting, happy to submit them for public exhibition. How good some of them are and how difficult it was to choose. And quite exhausting.

 

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