About

I was born in the UK and learned to carry my home on my back from an early age as my sister and I followed our parents around the country’s air force bases. Thanks to the art books my mother carted around with us, the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel fascinated me from a very early age. I was also in love with a cartoon character called Marine Boy, another cartoon creation made flesh in the figure of Adam West as Batman and a puppet called Scott Tracy from the Gerry Anderson Super-Marionation series "Thunderbirds". The propensity for two of these characters to wear skin tight clothing, and get themselves into scrapes which involved being tied up a lot, sometimes by a lady in a cat mask may have something to add to my later creations.

Anyway, animation was a rather wonderful thing, of course I watched as many Hannah Barbera as there was on UK Television at the time, but the biggest eye opener for me were the animations labelled National Film Board of Canada, the human pixelations and scratch film music of Norman Maclaren made a big impression, and having no camera, I constructed various methods of making images move, flip books and scrolls and of course puppets.
Inevitably, after a job in a chicken factory and  another selling ties
- there was nothing left to do but go to the art college.

I ended up studying Fine Art in London and despite the lack of the usual equipment, I made animated films at college, experimenting with live action pixilation, scratch animation drawn directly onto film, stop motion and drawn animation on cells.

All being of rather an ad-hoc nature the filming was accomplished by means of a camera and tripod balanced on books above a board on the floor. The cells used to attract a lot of dust and hairs, which added texture to my work. If only Pez had been around then, I might have been inspired to leave the contents out and concentrate on animating the hairs. A couple of cheap flood lamps provided the lighting, and these were switched off at 5-minute intervals to prevent the bulbs blowing, which was a good idea when animating real fish.

At this time I was quite into the works of a band called Throbbing 
Gristle who explored social and sexual mores using images of bondage,  
a friend called Dwight Clarke also showed me some old copies of Atomage magazine, a bondage magazine with tips, merchandise and lots of readers pics. I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of this amazingly serious rubberwear against backgrounds of sweet suburban bliss floral wallpaper swirly carpets and Crinoline Lady toilet-paper holders etc consequently my work began to take on a rather fetishy feel. The magazine itself (yes, I sent some of my work) found my work too humorous, they wanted dark dungeons and distressed damsels whilst my pictures showed happy latex housewives and leather cherubs, however, undaunted, much of my work as an illustrator has continued to allude to this subject matter.

After College a variety of creative activities ensued Window dressing, Button painting, Pavement drawing, and Cartooning and illustrating.
In addition, work on a big London market kept the money coming in whilst I was following my true calling –  like everybody else I knew, as a singer in a band. One record deal later, and a couple of years avoiding the sun in various basement studios, the band and label parted company, and although I went on to work with other musicians, all the enjoyment had gone. I wondered who was going to employ an almost pop star who did a bit of illustration on the side. I decided a short introductory course in Computer graphics was in order and to cut a long story short I ended up in various jobs as a web designer, learning how to code and trying to make blue shiny buttons look new and interesting. I started to experiment with Flash 2 ostensibly for web design.

As a vector based drawing tool alone it was easier to control and more intuitive than other programs and the smaller file sizes of vector graphics were attractive. But I was drawn to the animation side and I loved the way you could sketch straight into the program making a quicker link between Inspiration and Animation.

A stint in a chicken factory after I finished school may be behind the reason I wanted to make an animation to Cinbo Matto's 'You Gotta Know Your Chicken". Anyway, so inspired, I got straight in there. I started with a music track and started simultaneously developing characters and animating them and the story evolved along with the animation. The spontaneity led to some interesting results but also led to lots of re-
work, so it took several months to complete, but by that time I'd got  
a handle on things and I was smitten.

It was a natural progression to build upon all the fetish-based characters I had developed as part of my earlier illustration work, and my character Ms Swat is an amalgamation of all of these, first appearing  as an interactive birthday card for a slightly naughty friend.

I decided to make her the heroine of my next animation! This one wasn’t going to take me a year. I applied an austere graphic style to some rather simple visual jokes, which worked well when presented in a rubbery context. The minimum palette and tiny running time also meant a very short download, which was, as I was to hear later “perfect for the office”! I sent my first Swatoons to Hotwired Animation Express, an animation portal run by Wired magazine, which was then a starting point for many web animators. They took all three and expressed interest in showing more, the feedback I built up through this initial foray gave me the impetus to carry on developing the stories and I built a site around the results.

A lot of my inspiration comes from movies simply because films have played such a major part in my life, I was a bit of a I don’t wanna go out for a long walk I want to stay and watch films” child and… not a lot has changed. Indeed my animations are my way of making movies, smaller more compact movies, it’s easier to control everything when you make it yourself. Stylists like Hitchcock, Dario Argento, David Lynch, Mario Bava and Michael Powell whose exhilarating and hypnotic use of colour and sound and control of camera movements and angles fix their reality so firmly in your imagination you can’t help but give up and go along with them.  (I also have the feeling that they are all rather partial to the colour Red which has featured somewhat in my own
work.) I’m inspired and want to re-create the feeling I get when I’m in the thrall of a great movie, I want to adapt this Cinematic stylisation and colour to my animations for atmoshpere and effect. I think that by by taking elemets from one discipline  - to another… it changes -  it grows into something else. I also love the work of Jan Svankmeyer, that constant repetition in resplendent and surreal colour makes you feel like you are watching some magic ritual.  Magic, ritual and cyclic repetition also feature in the narrative of my animations.

After seeing Ms Swat projected at various festivals, and after experimenting with painting her I realised I wanted to make large prints from actually stills (or developed stills) from the animations. 
Painting was merely copying from the computer, it seemed to me to be a retrograde step, sure I could make them big but by copying so carefully, to try and get the line consistent had a deadening effect, also the colours weren’t as brilliant as they were on screen. Still I pursued the idea, and I found  a printer who was just starting to use ink jet or large format printing, I didn’t realise that at the time I was at the edge of what was to become  a revolution in art reproduction and digital printing - I just wanted big Swats hanging all over. It took me a while to get the red and to get the look but over the years it has been worth it, and I’ve exhibited and sold Swat canvases at fairs and shows in the UK.

During this time, with other work coming in, animation was taking a bit of a back seat. But then I started to develop some images using another character on the site called Madame So. This was another organic process, a picture started then another and then I thought about animating it, so I got an animation of a dog running and then a story started to come together from there.
Back to the storyboard I went, and because I knew I had an audience with the art shows I deliberately made it into the style of a comic book, working in pencil and then in Flash I got the comic together and then when it was on show, started to make the animation using the comic as storyboard.

It was nice to tell people who’d bought the comic book version that they could now see the finished animation on line, and it’s gone on to show at some festivals recently. I also developed a back story in the telling, and this is now informing the latest tale. This has been my coffee shop opus, and once again has grown organically, I’m telling the tale to myself in storyboard format.

SO I'm letting stories grow much more, branching out from an  original storyboard that includes talking people through the story at art shows, talking with friends about certain parts of the stories that appeal and taking on board their remarks.

It's been a long journey, and it's been a bumpy ride at times, but what's kept me going has been the feedback from Swat fans around the world and other like-minded artists and animators. The prints on this site are one of the results of some years of work. I originally sold these at art fairs and it's only now after launching another site featuring item designs inspired by one of my other passions, that of Giallo films that I have finally managed to start selling these prints online.
People who have seen my work before may wonder where the canvas prints are and I'm still pondering how I could make these available online - as the cost of transportation would be quite pricey, but anyone can contact me about these and I shall look at putting the images up soon.