CV Indices One set of twenty CV: I - XX : 650 Kb Two sets of ten CV: I - X : 318 Kb CV: XI - XX : 344 Kb Four sets of five CV: I - V : 170 Kb CV: VI - X : 160 Kb CV: XI - XV : 176 Kb CV: XVI - XX : 181 Kb Individual CV pages I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

... this series attempts to redress the balance by exploring, in a sequence of blank verse ruminations and pictorial glosses, the moments when I stumbled upon what has become my 'subject matter', that most important commodity for all artists.

The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 76-80.

Most children like sets of things. The stamp and cigarette-card collecting, however, usually become, with the chemistry sets and rainbow rows of coloured pencils, transmuted in adulthood into filing systems and golf clubs. It is one of the charms of life rather than one of its humiliations to spot the childhood ancestry of some present folie de grandeur. Is knowing the head waiter of a fashionable restaurant who calls you by your name, directs you to a favourite table and gives you an aperitif on the house, substantially different from having got on the right side of the lady in the sweet shop who with a wink will give you extra measure? As is was, so it is, and my particular love of amassing sets of things has turned into the making of them. Time and again I have painted a picture only to find the call for another to provide a pair, and to yield then to the irresistible urge to add another and another to 'build up a set' (the magic of the phrase still excites), of works of identical size on the same theme, hoping of course that some big boy in the great playground of the art world has in turn retained his passion for set collecting and will swap me lots of money for it.

Thus a set of pictures certainly seemed apt as a format for dealing with childhood. If their scale is larger than that of the matchbox top or those other first collected things, might this be a way of saying that childhood's little epiphanies were in fact great revelations?

Why Curriculum Vitae? Are those not the world's dullest documents, a yawn to produce or peruse?

In the days when I used to apply for jobs (before I managed to get away with making art all the time) I was always writing out CV's. After I left school (having dodged National Service)(Phew!), I went on the dole, which involved being regularly sent for interviews. My main aim at that stage of course was not to get the job (though I did enjoy going round factories and being told 'There's a bright future for you, my lad, in the world of ball-bearings') so I made my CV appropriately sparse. Later on, with a family to support, I learned to muster impressive lists of qualifications and achievements in order to apply for teaching posts. I must have got these slightly wrong for I always seemed to end up in Ipswich or Wolverhampton rather than at the art school that nestles at the bottom of my road.

Reading through such CV's now I see that in no way did they reflect my real existence or document my life. They spoke only of things unimportant to me, news from a grey world. A true chronicle of key events would be quite different, for the great cluster of formative discoveries and unconscious insights occurs in early childhood and is only repeated with variations in later life. Important shifts of awareness become less and less frequent as one goes on: this is the opposite pattern to one's perceived career, a story of ever increasing achievements and higher honours. > >

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