I always loved drawing. My first love of art came from cartoons - even though my mother was a painter (I never liked her paintings and found them rather disturbing).
I was the generation to grow up with Disney, Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion & the Smurfs to name but a few. Because of this I naturally gravitated to comic books once I began reading and my favorite were the 'Asterix' series by Goscinny & Underzo. To this day I am in awe of the drawing talent of Underzo (see pic below):
I was always amazed that a small line in the right spot on a facial drawing could translate in my brain to being a 'nose' for example...it is for this amazing deconstruction - reducing a real image to a series of fewer & fewer lines yet still having the ability to retain the essence of the original image - that I find endlessly fascinating.
Anyway upon studying art in high school, I was forced to choose two artists of the 'pop' era to do a project on. To be honest, at that stage in my life I thought most art was complete crap. So I chose Roy Lichtenstein who did some nice copies of cartoon pictures - but enlarged to the point that you could see the dots that made up the colours from the magazine printing (see pic below):
Well, these were my early inspirations...but what then? The truth is I gave up on art in favour of science. I went to university and got distracted by boys, friends and other things young people (and some not so young) get distracted by...Well, a lot happened in a very short space of time, suffice to say my life was thrown into upheaval and after many years of depressed brooding, my partner made me a canvas one night, got out some paints and some newspaper and set it all up in front of me and told me to 'just paint'.
And that was was start of it all....now I know I've glossed over a lot of things, but I think I'll just wrap it up be stating that I enjoy painting things that make me feel happy & at peace, stuff that can make me tune out the bad day I've just had...and think about something positive, even if its just the beauty of the shapes & colours :)
