When I was young I spent a whole lot of time drawing series after series of works and developed a style of drawing and painting that suited me.
I have never before published any of them but they are all carefully stored; while some of the paintings have been lost, all the drawings survive and I will publish them as I photograph them.
I was very influenced by the photography of Man Ray and the Dadaist movement.
Around that time -1965-1972 -I was working as a very young art director in some of the top advertising agencies in Dublin, Ireland.
The foreign influence on Irish art, design and film was huge back then in the early and mid 60s, with a massive influx of Dutch, Belgian, German and French designers into what really was, in truth, a quite provincial capital city after the war.
Names like animator Gunter Wolf, film-maker George Fleischmann, artist and jazz trumpeter Piet Sluis, photographer Louis Pieterse, artist and writer Jan De Fow; these are just a few of the many names that immediately come to mind. (I will add more as I remember them)
There were Scots and English too, like the wonderful typographer Rex McDonald, painter and designer Jack Cudworth, art director and designer Walter Bernardini. I worked with them all in one job or another over the years and soaked up everything I learned from them all like a sponge.
For me, the world of advertising was a wonderland of learning and of excitement, with the emphasis on creativity and knowledge. I had missed out on the National College of Art in my hurry to move forward and become an artist/art director/designer and I was very successful back then, earning enough to buy a house and start a family in reasonable comfort, but eventually I had to leave and set up on my own as an artist and writer. I even wrote, art directed, produced and directed a few TV commercials and that was fun too.
None of it satisfied my basic urge to just draw and paint so I started to set myself a goal of producing art for it’s own sake and committed myself to drawing everyday and producing a painting every month, all the while trying to earn a lving in advertising and design.