The Sailor Paintings - A History of Violence.

My earliest memories are of grotesque acts of violence in the pubs and clubs of the English seaside towns where I grew up. Drunks fighting, faces slashed with Stanley knives, eyes gouged, throats torn open with broken bottles. As a child, the only way I knew to deal with this was by making drawings of the things I’d seen. In school, my drawings, and the fact that I refused to stop making them, got me expelled aged 6 years old after I stabbed a teacher with a blackboard compass for confiscating my drawings and humiliating me. It seemed like a normal reaction at the time.

The drawings were a symptom of fear, a way of visualising the violence of my surroundings, this is a technique I have employed during my career as an artist. My involvement in crime during youth and experiences of sex and violence became the main subjects of my paintings, these were often figurative with plain black backgrounds to emphasise the protagonists and their actions. I wanted as little distraction as possible from the brutality which was necessary to display.

I grew up near an old naval port, I saw sailors fighting in the pubs close to where I attended school. These men in their blue serge uniforms, often armed with razors or knives, began appearing in my paintings as a result of witnessing their conflicts. Sailors became the main protagonists in my work, the embodiment of human violence, a metaphor for my fears.

To understand this, you have to understand what England was like in the 1970’s and 80’s. Trade union disputes, strikes, riots in London, the Falklands war, football hooligans, poverty, crippling governmental and institutional failure. This unfolded to the backdrop of the tail end of the cold war. It was a tense time, some sections of society turned to drink, drugs, and violence to release their tension. Some of the aggressors came from youth or cultural movements such as the mods, skinheads, or punks. Many of these gangs from London came to the seaside resorts to drink and settle their disputes. Whatever their affiliations, I watched their disputes and turned them all into sailors on the canvas.

I often depicted the sailors as gaunt and emaciated, an outward symbol of their inner famine and lack of humanity. They are sometimes accompanied by images of prostitutes I encountered while working in the nightclubs and strip joints in London.

The way I depicted sailors changed in the late 1990’s after I became aware of the white summer rig uniform worn by French sailors. I realised that blood stains would look far more effective on white fabric and from then on, all of the sailors wore white uniforms.

I have spent decades painting my experiences as a way of working with the violent impulses I developed growing up in the streets of north Kent, the sailors, and the brutality they represent have been a necessary part of my personal and artistic development. Studying the base elements of behaviour have allowed me not only insight into the human condition, but a way of moving forward into other areas of artistic exploration. My various series based on religion, myths and spirituality would not have been possible without the self-confrontational Sailors series which provided a foundation for the rest of my work. They are the demons I have returned to constantly, to visualise the human shadow, the violence of my past, and the environment I was brought up in.