The earliest evidence of human art is thought to date from South Africa and is 70,000 years old. It consists of some simple markings on an ochre rock. It is believed by some scientists and archaeologists that if we discover the earliest forms of human art, then we will have discovered the day humans learned to think.

Thinking makes us what we are. No other animal has the ability to look at the world around it and transform it the way humans do. Other animals live day to day, but we can plan ahead, dream and create to make those dreams come to fruition.

It is said that we may not hope to understand the very ancient beginnings of art unless we try to enter the mind of the prehistoric people who produced it. For me that is precisely the point of all art – it begins life as a journey through some body’s mind and manifests itself with an act of creation.

It is this world of the mind, this ability to capture a scene or an image of ones imagination that really interests me. Art can be either a vehicle of truth or a way to express what is unreal. It is a thought, an image, an expression, a fantasy, an ideal, a reality or just an idea, a spark of life from an artist’s mind. But the production of any object also relies on both manual skill and technical knowledge.

I can still remember my first recognisable drawing, my very first day at school. I cried for the whole half a day I was there, but I remember drawing George Best in his red and white Manchester United football kit. I was five, it was 1971.

Today most of my art consists of trying to capture an image or a feeling of the places I have visited. Whether that is just the mechanics of what the place looked like or an image that conveys the atmosphere, the weather, the very feeling that a place invoked within me. I also like to paint images of people that capture a certain emotional state, someone in thought – to make the viewer try and decide what that person is thinking. But there is also a side of me that wants to convey the fantastical, the ideal and the heroic.

I first learned to draw the human form from American comic books. I couldn’t get enough of them for both the art and the stories that ran riot through my mind, fuelling my imagination. I remember surprising my junior school teacher when I was about nine years old with a drawing of a battle scene consisting of all the superheroes I knew at the time, courtesy of Marvel Comics. There must have been about forty characters in all, with the Scarlet Witch* looking every inch as she did in the comics – very womanly for a nine year old. I received a special certificate of merit that year for my art.

For Christmas that same year I received my first drawing board, with a roll of lining paper, allowing me to drawing, large-scale, characters.

The pantheon of Norse gods I also read about at that time sparked my interest in mythology along with our school work about the ancient Egyptians. At the same time my work progressed to oil painting. I was trying to capture comic book type imagery in grand paintings heavily influenced by the renaissance style. I didn’t know until I got to secondary school that there was such a genre of art known as Science Fantasy. But the art teachers there didn’t seem to encourage it. Fantasy gives the opportunity of producing original bizarre worlds far more colourful than the one we actually live in - worlds of romance and technology with heroic characters far larger than life.

When I left school I was producing my own comics for my own amusement. But this was put aside as I entered the world of automotive manufacture at Jaguar Cars Ltd, deep in the heart of the industrial Midlands where I was born and raised.

As a draughtsman I designed and produced technical drawings for the manufacture of body shell assembly tooling. Some of which were still an imaginative journey in order to make real what someone else wanted to build. It was always a design challenge to make the near impossible, feasible with both repeatability and reliability.

Product feasibility became a driver for me, believing that it is not acceptable for engineers to have to make good what designers have failed to take into consideration. Good design overcomes and compliments the engineering difficulties.

My project management skills and advanced manufacturing strategic thinking were developed on multi-million pound automation projects, taking them from concept to customer and liaising with engineers all over the world, from Europe, the USA, to South Africa and Japan.

When I left the company after twenty four years, I was the Manager and Principal Engineer for Current Manufacturing Engineering across three bodyshops producing the XJ, XK and S-Type body shells, responsible for all body shell processes and dimensional quality and eliminating waste in the system by utilising current lean thinking and philosophies.

For these reasons I have both the technical knowledge and skill to fulfil many varied commissions. I work in all genres, in traditional media and both 2D and 3D computer graphics (CG) using Photoshop CS2, Artrage and Bryce.

*The property of Marvel Characters Inc and is a registered trademark.