About Me /

So lets go back in time for a tall tale…..

I would say I have always done things in my own way, right from day one of formal education. By the time I finished ‘school’ when I was 17 I was rather lost, the artistic box was closing.

Definitely too young to be deciding where & what I wanted to be doing, I had also lost the heart for art so I new Art School was not the path to be taking at that time & im glad I didn’t go. Instead I went to the Glasgow College Of Building & Printing to do a NC Decorative & Architectural Glass Work Course. As I remember mostly because that was the page the prospectus opened at….

This is what I made for my end of term project, my first window circa 1998/99 inspired by Neil Young’s first album cover.

I was way too young to handle Glasgow at that time & hated the place so I moved back up north where there were trees & quiet…. I didn’t do any more glass work & hadn’t drawn in years. I worked in Inverness then moved to Edinburgh in September 2001 just for a change of scene.

In 2002 a friend persuaded me to go back to college and finish the course so I enrolled on the HND Glass Course in Glasgow, commuting from Edinburgh.

One day in late 2002 I was walking home & struck by the colour of the autumn leaves.  I picked some up and took them home.  I had just bought some glass from college & decided I wanted to make something. I put the leaves in a CD case (which I still have) and thought I could make something similar out of glass so I began experimenting…..

This was one of the very first hangers, and the next year in 2003 I had my first stall for a weekend during the Edinburgh West End Craft Fair during the festival. I had about 25 hangers to sell, and I did sell quite a few. I wonder where they are now? The money I made bought more glass & materials….

Late 2003 I started getting the desire to draw again & in preparation for a Christmas craft fair at the Assembly Rooms George St Edinburgh I did this..

That was the last fair I did for a while, I dropped out of college at the start of 2005 because I wasn’t getting much out of it & painted this swirling eagles affair the next day. I had landed the job in the restoration studio sometime around then, I cant really remember the dates… but I had learnt more in the restoration studio in 2 weeks than I had in 2yrs of college.

So a year into working in the studio I was beginning to do more painting, or at least the desire had returned. Things got a bit quiet in the studio in April 2006 and I moved back up North. The plan was to travel to Canada in January 2007 so I spent the remainder of 2006 painting & at the end of the year rented the Nairn Arts Societies Hall and staged an exhibition of the Paintings I had put together. I also reinvented the leaf hangers, it had been so long since I had made one I had completely forgotten how to do it.

It had taken until i was 25 until to make the conscious decision that I owed it to myself to spend sometime exploring the joy I had previously know.  I locked myself away and painted that whole summer, the exhibition went really well.

This was the best painting that came out of that time, I called it ‘Down By The River’.  The leaf hangers were a lot more advanced than the first ones and I was making rapid changes in design and production.  I travelled to Canada at the start of 2007, it was a short lived trip but upon my return I launched straight into my art work.  That summer I took a stall at the Nairn farmers show and met Isabel who had just started a company called Exclusively Highlands.  I started doing craft shows with them around the Highlands. I continue to do the fairs every year in November & December.

The following year in Feb 2008 I had enough money to buy a stock of lead and switched over to making everything in lead instead of copperfoil.  The first thing I made when the lead arrived was this panel. For no other reason than I really wanted to make something mighty! And mighty it was….

Next up was to date the largest home install I have done. It came out great using autumn Ginkgo Leaves.

 

Next I put some work in some local galleries and did the disastrous Inverness Homes & Gardens Show that April.  I was working pretty hard that year doing nights in a Bar and organising the art by day.  I hated the bar by the end of the year, and I lost the rag one night and quit.

The next day I managed to get hold of a empty shop unit from some lovely folks who ran health place in Nairn. I ran a exhibition there for  13days.  It wasn’t overly successful.  I had to sit down one night & have a think. I was at a major crossroads. Continuing with Art was going to require total commitment. Could I give it that and at what cost? I thought about it a fair bit and after a while asked myself the rather grand question, but I think quite logical….. :

If I stop making these hangers, quit art & go get a job, and they cease to exist would it be a loss to the world….or do I continue and focus completely on Art, would that be of benefit to the world?  I decided I like the fact I was channelling all my effort into filling the world up with stained glass & paintings, it was worth doing, it was of benefit. So that was that. I also felt I had already travelled too far down the road to turn back now.

I packed up and moved back to Edinburgh with the aim to live exclusively from my art work from now on (aim but no plan!), it was beautiful up North but too lonely, no folk to talk to unless you really really enjoy getting drunk… a lot.. so I split and headed south once more.

It was August time and mid festival. I went to the meadows and set some things out on a banket and hanged them from a tree.  A kid went past me, I wrote down in my diary what he said…

“your silly because you’ve got your furniture outside”

I didn’t make much on the meadows, I was silly. I worked in a store for a while then come November took to the streets again.  I really hoped it could work, I wondered why no one did this. Is putting your work into a gallery the only route?  There cant just be one path?   This was a bad time, I was eating porridge twice a day.   I worked all day every day that December on Rose Street and on the Royal mile at night. And it was grim, really grim, people just ignored me.  But I stuck at it and come Christmas Eve made more in the last 2 days than I had all month.  Enough to warrant all those hours in the cold….?

This was stall number one. Rose Street Edinburgh started around December 2008. Me & my bamboo table. Its asking a lot for your average member of the public to stop and look at work in this setting. You take something out of its natural place (a gallery) and try it somewhere unusual (the street) your really going against the grain in every way. But why not? Why is it unusual to do this? I was persistent I would find a way to make it work, make a better stall, understand how to break the barriers. I had learnt a lot from the craft shows but this was a totally different setting. I can talk to people fine, at a craft show most people are there to chat… but out here the people are not expecting to chat, they are not expecting to look at art. They are on their way home or to the shop or to meet someone. This stall is not on the program its unexpected, the unexpected is avoided.

2009 January 22nd I finished this picture…

Back onto Rose Street at the start of March 2009, damn it was cold on that street. The sales were non existent so I abandoned on Friday the 3rd of April to meet a friend in the Meadows park. Turning the corner out of Rose St. I was met with the sunshine and warmth. I walked past the RSA Gallery heading up the steps to the Mound. I thought to myself this would make a much better location….

And it did, I now have hangers out there in homes across the globe. From the Scottish borders, the Highlands and across England & Ireland & Wales to wide world…. New York city, Tokyo,  a Antarctic research station! , even one in the home of a lady that curates the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum my architectural hero.  California, Holland, Mexico, Russia… everywhere!!

I wrote down every sale and where they went to. I took paintings down when the weather was nice. It was great, it was hard too often some days I nearly went mad, but I was outside everyday breathing the air doing what I wanted and the good generally balanced the bad. That was 2009.

2010 I started drawing on the street. I got into doing these misty forest pictures, I put together around 20 of them over the year. That was the first time I had ever reached the level of drawing every day. That was interesting.

I did a couple exhibitions with a group called Artspace2let. We had a number of exhibitions, the best one at the World Heritage House on Charlotte Sq.

That summer was full on work, the money was bad but I was driving it pretty hard. Got together with some other folk and put on a Exhibition in a gallery/studio  that was empty. Working the street by day 10/7 then the exhibition 7 / 12 everyday for the whole month. It paid off in the end I sold a couple paintings to a Doctor from London who had a surgery called ‘The Woods’. How appropriate.

Also made the next 2 home install windows. These 2 windows were from the same flat in Edinburgh, made in 2009/10.

Christmas of 2010 it was brutally cold on the street. I did the month, but never again. It had been a bad year overall & there was talk of new work at the restoration studio. So I finished after Christmas happy to of given the streets my best shot, I certainly put in the time. I guess I had this kind of ideal about it all that didnt really come true, but I did meet some nice folk and my work is now all round the world. Sold direct by me, not through a gallery which I really value. But overall I couldn’t do another year.

The important thing was I had made the break away from putting Art on the back burner and just slaving away working minimum wage jobs,wasting time.

In 2011 I had taken a good few months break from making anything. I was really burnt out from 2010, well the last couple years. In May I started making again, this time I wanted to make something new. I had kind of exhausted the leaf work and wanted to try painting & fired work.

Straight off the bat was the plan to layer glass with painting on each side, to give muted effects and combination colours.

I ran with this idea through 2011 and did a run of fairs at Christmas with the new product, and during December decided to rent a studio in Glasgow. I left Edinburgh & moved over to Glasgow on January 4th 2012.

The restoration work may pick up in the future, I’ve certainly enjoyed the work I did get. Working on churches not just in Edinburgh but as far up as Aberdeen. Restoring vandalized windows, rescuing wrens from organ pipes, sandwhiches in the country side, dusty days in the hot sun, frozen days in the wind & snow.  I learnt a lot.  If ever the phrase ‘old school’ was to be applied to a job, Stained Glass is that job. But for now its time for me to focus on the Art.

So that was the last 10 years…  Lets see what happens in the next 10….