Purchased in 1987 by Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria.    Apropos of nothing . . . four years after making this painting two tornado aircraft collided head-on over my village . . . in the exact same spot that the tornado appears here. Sadly all four pilots were killed.

This painting was commissioned by Culgaith Parish Council in association with Eden District Council (Millenium Fund) and is now hanging in St Lawrence Church, Kirkland.

Commissioned in 2002 by a family in Bangalore, this painting depicts an area at the foot of Cross Fell, looking back towards the village where I live and then beyond to the Eden Valley.

Jarrod appears in this painting a dozen times and is engaged in various farming activities. The building behind him is also ephemeral with the distant fellside showing through. . . as though we are looking back to a period before the building was erected in the 17th century. A bastle house is a semi-fortified construction built to protect it's occupants from the marauding Scots. Animals would be kept downstairs and this would make things warmer for people living upstairs.

Collection: Lakeland Arts, Cumbria

I like to draw and paint those ordinary things and activities that I am most familiar with . . . but my subject is usually chosen because, at a deeper level, there is something within it that feels vital to me. In retrospect I see a painting like 'Tumble', which depicts about twenty sheep huddled precariously together, to be a private metaphor for the fears and anxieties I was experiencing back in the early 1990's.

This large oil painting was made on my return to the UK from the Falkland Islands. 'Palenque' (Spanish: meaning 'arena' or 'palisade') is the name the Islanders have for the structure in the painting. Enormous Turkey Vultures, with their incredible sense of smell, are attracted to the curing carcass of beef from miles away . . . but are kept at bay by netting draped over the meat. In the foreground are sheep skins, also hung out to dry - see 'Running Fence'.

Cooplands Bakery Residency (1983). A triple portrait of Sandra hand-linking sausages.

When I was at art school (Saint Martin's in London in the late 1960's) the National Gallery was just a few hundred yards down Charing Cross Road. I visited the gallery almost every day for a couple of years and steeped myself in European painting since the fourteenth century. As a consequence of this, whether I like it or not, my work is imbued with Christian iconography. With 'Father and Son', whilst not setting out to depict the narrative of the Prodigal Son, I like the thought that, at a subconscious level, that particular parable would add to the authority of the painting.