Applying for exhibitions can be tricky. It is never entirely clear how the gallery wants you to present yourself. There are two tracks you can follow–the impersonal and the personal. Either they expect me to describe my work as if some detached and independent observer were encountering it, and the comment is the subject of … Read more
I took early retirement from university teaching in 2001, and my principal aim in this was to do what I had wanted to do for a long time, namely, to be an artist. There was a time before then, however, when I had contemplated quite a different course of action. It might have been as … Read more
Many years ago I used to be a regular fan of the stories of John Wyndham. A recurring theme in his short stories was a situation in which somebody’s time somehow split, and different selves were able to travel into the future, following quite different trajectories determined by apparently insignificant choices. The curious twist, if … Read more
I find myself in a strange frame of mind at the moment. Everybody seems to agree that the world in which we live has come to a very critical point. This is nowhere more clear than in the UK, where the very fabric of political life appears to be disintegrating before our eyes. Whoever I … Read more
The process of sorting through the cache of old papers I discovered recently is a fascinating one, in several respects. Who was the man who wrote these things? Some of it is deeply familiar, but other parts of it surprisingly strange. Back in the ‘seventies, for example, I projected a book on the work of … Read more