I think of this exhibition as a passage through life in paintings, from infancy to old age, using some portraits of my family members and of friends painted over many years. Also included there are scenes taken from my main painting subject matter, which is of people in present day situations. I have chosen from them pictures which I thought would illustrate specific periods of life, some of which the viewer might identify with at whatever stage of life they are at.

Among the scenes will be two large paintings, Awakenings, and Evening Entertainment which originate from a set of, “The Seven Ages”, which were painted in the late 1970s, widely exhibited in the 1980s in London and East Anglia and featured on television. All were set in the same fictitious room, which showed the ages and the same scene outside becoming progressively more urbanised; time passing.

Another painting to be in the exhibition is Sunlight on Old Stone 1995, of my granddaughter Rose as a child by a medieval tomb figure; a theme of my work which I think of as, “the past in the present”. The mystery of life; why am I here? Also the connections we have to our own ancestors, the fleeting passing of time, and in particular, our own time, which is all so transitory. My work has been an attempt over the years to record, and in the process of painting to dwell on such issues.

I considered myself a Modernist in my early years, and was elected to the AIA (Artists International Association) an avant-garde group, and had my first exhibition with them at their gallery near Leicester Square, London in 1968. During that period my paintings were shown at the RA Summer Exhibitions and elsewhere in London.

Later my family and I lived in East Anglia, and my work evolved through various stages to my present “realist” style. By about 1973 I had found my vocation, to paint the everyday life of my own time. Following an exhibition in Cambridge in 1975, I was invited to join the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors, and eventually became its chairman, showing our work at Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam Museum in the city. Over the years I exhibited widely in East Anglia in the 1970s and 1980s and occasionally in London. Later we lived in Norfolk and I also joined the Norwich 20 Group.

I have lived by the sea at Ynyslas in Ceredigion since 2000, and became a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2013. A regular contributor to the MOMA Machynlleth Summer Exhibitions, my last exhibition with them was of “Night Paintings “in 2018.